Some 65 million girls worldwide are kept out of school, increasing the risks that they will suffer from extreme poverty, die in childbirth or from AIDS and passing those dangers from generation to generation, the U.N. children's fund said Thursday.

"We believe that the failure to invest in girls' education puts in jeopardy more development goals than any other single action that could take place," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy in an interview with The Associated Press.

In its annual State of the World's Children report, UNICEF said 121 million children around the world are out of school, of whom the majority are girls.

"When a girl is without the knowledge and life skills that school can provide, there are immediate and long-term effects; she is exposed to many more risks than her educated counterparts and the consequences are bequeathed to the next generation," the study said.

The U.N.'s "millennium goals" on poverty reduction commit the world to parity for boys and girls in primary education by 2005, but most acknowledge that this will be impossible to achieve.

When poor families are forced to make a choice, they decide to pay for the education of their sons, but that doesn't mean they don't want their daughters to be educated as well, Bellamy said.

She gave the example of Kenya, where school attendance has shot up by at least 1.2 million since primary school fees were abolished at the beginning of this year.

Throughout Africa, UNICEF said, a push to get girls into school has seen big improvements. In five years, school enrollment rates for girls rose by 15 percent in Guinea, 12 percent in Senegal and 9 percent in Benin.

In the most striking example, the number of girls enrolled in first grade in the central African country of Chad quadrupled in two years, while the dropout rate decreased from 22 percent to 9 percent and the number of female teachers rose from 36 to 787.

Despite the successes, however, at the current rate of funding it is estimated that it will take until 2129 to achieve universal primary education in sub-Saharan Africa.

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