It is at least comforting that the goal of providing universal primary education will be achieved in most regions with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa. However, gender gap are quite stark. Two-thirds of the illiterate adults are women and three-fifths of the children out of school are girls. These gaps are likely to persist and gender equality goal will be missed.
Training programmes, necessarily, will have to be followed up by a rigorous exercise of “impact evaluation” involving analysis of employee behavior, perceptible changes in operational and behavioural efficiency, observing emerging business practices a little more closely etc. Perhaps, the biggest barrier to training initiatives is resistance to change.