ABSTRACT
In 1995, when the Beijing World Conference on Women agreed a wide-ranging Platform for Action on women's rights and gender equality, education and poverty featured prominently. The dynamics of the conference put multilateral organisations, national governments and a large NGO/civil society community into dialogue. This chapter discusses the practices invoked by the gatherings at the Beijing Conference that were associated with a self-proclaimed politics of transformation, which combined ideas about what gender does with formulations of what gender activists dreamed about and aspired to realise. It highlights how the assumptions of those working on Education for All (EFA) in global policy bodies saw the links between gender, poverty and education. The chapter describes the nature of the institutions and the global NGOs as examples of terrains of a middle space where global policy frameworks concerning gender equality and education were reviewed by differently situated actors.
