Global Education Financing: How We Could Have Done Better

Malala asked world leaders to agree to a concrete way to fully fund 12 years of education for every child at the International Conference on Financing for Development — but they failed to deliver. Here’s how they could have done better.

Just two weeks ago, Malala warned world leaders that there would be “many tests in the coming months and years” to their commitment to 12 years of free, quality primary and secondary education for every child.

Watch Malala’s speech at the 2015 Oslo Education Summit here.

Last week was one of those tests… and they barely passed.

The International Conference on Financing for Development, which took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last week, was an opportunity for leaders from 193 countries to agree a concrete way forward to fully fund 12 years of education for every child.

Leaders did commit to scale up investments to allow all children to complete free, equitable, inclusive and quality primary and secondary education, but the Addis Ababa Action Agenda that resulted from the conference failed to map out a path for doing so.

Without a clear plan to mobilize the money necessary between now and 2030 to provide all children with a quality education, it could be another 100 years before all girls in sub-Saharan Africa have the opportunity to complete 12 years of education.Commitments will fail to translate into action. Words will fail to translate into reality. Potential will fail to translate into change.

So, how could the world’s leaders have done better?

1. Leaders from rich countries could have committed to reversing declines in aid to education for the poorest countries.

Aid to education has been declining for the past five years. The poorest countries need the most help from the richer countries to meet the current funding shortfall to provide free, quality pre-school, primary and secondary education for every child by 2030, which stands at US $39 billion a year.

Despite this, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda agreed no time-bound targets for increases in overall development aid, and made no specific reference to targets for aid to education for the poorest countries.

2. Leaders could have committed to setting domestic spending targets on education of at least 20% of national budgets.

National spending on education must be increased if all children are to be able to access 12 years of primary and secondary school. Our recent report, Beyond Basics, shows that governments in low-income countries could raise an additional US $15 billion for education just by increasing the share of the national budget for education to 20%. This should be a minimum target for governments serious about education for all.

The closest the Addis Ababa Action Agenda gets to making this commitment?

“We…encourage countries to consider setting nationally appropriate spending targets.”

Hardly a decisive step towards meeting the ambition of 12 years of quality education for every child.

3. The Global Partnership for Education could have been recognized as the partnership mandated to support 12 years of primary and secondary education.

The Global Partnership for Education is the only international partnership focused on supporting countries’ efforts to provide all children in the poorest countries with a quality education. Over 20 donor countries channel significant amounts of their development aid for education through the partnership and 60 developing country governments receive support to provide education for all through the partnership.

However, the core commitment of the partnership is to basic education, which ends at lower secondary level, or around age 14. If the Global Partnership continues to focus primarily on supporting basic education, it will not be in a strong position to encourage its partners to aim higher and provide a full 12 years of primary and secondary schooling to every child.

The Addis Ababa Action Agenda did note a role for the GPE in delivering an ambitious education agenda post 2015 but failed to specifically recommend its expansion to cover the full 12 years, as well as a year of preschool.

At the Oslo Education Summit, Malala urged leaders to “be a child for a moment, dream with no limit, and dream bigger” so that they might take the decisive action necessary to get all children — including the poorest girls — a quality, safe primary and secondary education.

Unfortunately, they came to Addis as adults and failed to do all that they needed to support this ambition. They could have done better by charting a clear path towards meeting this commitment through adequate financing. Only then would we have had a true agenda for action from the Addis conference.

Over the next few months, we will be calling on you to help us mobilize more funding to meet the ambition of 12 years primary and secondary education for every child. We’ll be asking rich countries to provide more aid to basic and secondary education in the poorest countries, and asking national governments to increase their domestic spending on education.

We will also be feeding back on The Global Partnership for Education’s mandate to fund 12 years of primary and secondary education in its new 2016 to 2030 strategy.

Join Malala’s fight for 12 years of free, quality secondary education for every boy and girl.
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