UNICEF's Lake said even in Senegal, where the number of public schools has doubled in the last decade, there is still work to be done to achieve gender equality in schools.

He said girls in one Dakar school explained to him some of the daily challenges they face, such as the lack of bathrooms in the school, bullying from boys, and a lack of textbooks.

At the week-long conference, participants are focusing on three primary roadblocks to getting and keeping girls in school: violence, poverty and the poor quality of education being offered.

Though school enrollment has increased in recent years, experts say improved access to education must go hand-in-hand with improved quality.

Ann-Therese Ndong-Jatta is director of UNESCO's Regional Bureau for Education in Africa. She said we need to modify outdated curriculum and improve instruction methods, such as teaching African children in their native languages, not simply in English or French.

"The donors are pumping in a lot of resources," Ndong-Jatta explained. "Civil society is working on access but the truth is 75 percent of the children fail. How do we ensure that what children learn benefits them and would guarantee jobs? What we have today is a situation where children themselves shy away from continuing to secondary school because there is no future."

To ensure that a child stays in school and succeeds in school, she said, education must be useful.