2. Accessibility: Focus on girls Access to public schools should be guided by nondiscrimination, the overriding principle of international human rights law, which applies to civil and political, and economic, social and cultural rights, as well as to the rights of the child. Non-discrimination is not subject to progressive realization but has to be secured immediately and fully. Respect of parental freedom of choice for the education of their children is also not subject to progressive realization but should be guaranteed fully and immediately. Its exercise, however, sometimes clashes against the elimination of discrimination for the rights of the child, such as deprivation of education for girls. Primer No. 6 is devoted to discrimination, including in access to education, hence this one is confined to brief outline of access to education for girls. Indeed, the existing quantitative and qualitative information on the lack of access to education has thus far been systematically collected only for girls and women. The right to education has been demonstrated to act as a corrective to the free market. Governments indeed have human rights obligations because primary education should not be treated as a commodity. There has been a growing acceptance of the necessity for governmental intervention concerning access to primary education for girls. Many economists refer to the rationale for such intervention as a market failure. In its simplest version, it can be described as the unwillingness of parents to send their daughters to school because there is no economic rationale to invest in their daughters’ education. A demand for girls’ education thus has to be created by providing incentives to parents. Such initiatives showed that conflicting expectations upon girls may deprive them of access to education. If they are required to perform household labour, the school schedule has to be adapted to the seasonal and daily rhythm of subsistence food production or family life. Since poor families depend on the work of each member of the family for their survival, combining school and work often proves necessary so as to make school really accessible for girls. An interplay between non-availability of schools and parental choices often impedes girls’ access to education. There is a great deal of research targeting parental choices, but a paucity of information about the availability of schools for girls. Available schools may be open only to boys – by law or in fact – while the existing educational statistics do not make this difference visible. It is impossible to determine whether the available schools have a sufficient intake capacity to enrol and retain all primary age school girls or not. Table 5 shows that gender imbalance prejudices girls, although there are countries in which the girls outnumber the boys. Primary schools in the Caribbean or Eastern Europe have difficulties in attracting and retaining boys, one reason being that the vast majority of teachers are female. Right to Education Primers No. 3 27