SDG 4-Education 2030 – One and a Half Years On – Reflecting on the Challenges of Implementing Agenda 2030

• In Event: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): What progress for education a year and a half later?

Proposal

a) Presenter: UNESCO, Paris

In keeping with the overall SDG agenda, when it comes to Goal 4 and education, the text is supremely ambitious with a transformational vision that anticiipates a world with universal literacy for young people and with equitable and universal access to quality education.

It commits to providing inclusive and equitable quality education at all levels - early childhood, primary, secondary, tertiary, technical and vocational training’. So one and a half years on, this presentation will reflect on what have been the successes and challenges in setting a firm foundation for the agenda as a whole and for SDG 4 in particular. Some preliminary successes include national efforts to put in place integrated coordination mechanisms and processes covering the 17 goals, mapping of national development plans against the SDGs, increased global and regional advocacy, development of regional Education 2030 Frameworks of Action etc. Key initial challenges include understanding the implications of the new global agenda relative to local contexts, dissemination and communication down to local levels, on-going challenges on monitoring, indicators and reporting, interagency collaboration, parallel initiatives, processes and architecture. An overarching challenge is the lack of a clear focus on how to fund the new agenda.

The paper interrogates the alignment between the global architecture referred to above and the national planning processes, and between the global agreement to combat inequality and the national constraints on its rapid implementation.

b) Presenter: UNESCO Institute of Statistics

With the agreement on the SDGs, United Nations (UN) member states have made an historic commitment to address 17 broad targets. Recognizing the range of indicators required for comprehensive monitoring of the SDGs, the UN identified four types of indicators for each of the SDGs:  a small set of globally comparable indicators; a complementary set of thematic indicators, also globally-comparable; and then indicators that are specific to regional and national education issues. As far as SDG 4 on education is concerned, indicators of all four types are intended to cover multiple aspects of the education system, including access, participation and learning outcomes.  Successful measurement of Goal 4 will be defined by regularly-produced, reliable data that address the intent behind each target, and for the global and thematic indicators, comparable data from a majority of UN member states. 
The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) has been given the role to produce comparable education indicators cross-nationally, and to outline methodologies to work with partners to develop new indicators, statistical approaches and monitoring tools to better assess progress towards the international education targets. UIS’s strategy on Goal 4 includes multiple lines of work, including work on measuring learning outcomes and tracking access, equity and finance in education through interagency working groups and partnerships with other agencies.
One of the largest problems of equity in this process is that many countries simply don’t have the necessary data, and the poorer the country, the less the data.

Authors

• Aaron Benavot, State University of New York at Albany / UNESCO

• Albert Motivans, UNESCO Institute for Statistics