When you hear the word education what do you think of? Favorite teachers? Worst subjects? Test tubes and spelling tests? Without a doubt that form of education is hugely important. It enables a better understanding of a huge range of subjects, introduces you to the world of politics (mainly in the playground) and provides you with the skill of looking interested when you’d rather be doing something completely different. Yet education doesn’t just happen in the classroom. According to me, It doesn’t just happen when you’re trying to remember which is x and which is y or who the King of England was in 1066. It happens in the intangible, unrecorded, unwritten and un-memorized moments in the corridors, in the yard and, if you’re lucky, behind the bike sheds. It happens by doing things; many of them outside of the classroom. Education is one of the most critical areas of empowerment for women. It is also an area that offers some of the clearest examples of discrimination women suffer. Among children not attending school there are twice as many girls as boys, and among illiterate adults there are twice as many women as men. Offering girls basic education is one sure way of giving them much greater power -- of enabling them to make genuine choices over the kinds of lives they wish to lead. This is not a luxury. The Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women establish it as a basic human right.