Financing SDG 4: Context, Challenges, and Solutions

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Equity, ambition, and omission: can the sustainable development goals be sustained? (parts I and II)

Proposal

The new Sustainable Development Goal on education establishes more ambitious targets than the past Millennium Development Goals – moving beyond universal access to primary school and gender parity to include universalising primary and secondary education of good quality, ensuring access to early childhood care and education, advancing technical and vocational education, promoting youth and adult literacy within a framework of lifelong learning, as well as focusing on well-trained qualified teachers, improving equity and ensuring safe learning environments. This is more ambitious even than the EFA framework. However, the commitment to resourcing has gone down from the MDG era (from the recommendation of 6% of GDP to a looser range of 4-6% and from 20% of national budget to 15-20%). This apparent mismatch between expanded targets and diminishing financing commitment is troubling education stakeholders. Current resources for education in developing countries are stretched and the effects of this include a decline in peoples’ confidence in public education, an increasing fragmentation of provision and the spread of for-profit fee-charging schools – with worrying impacts on equity and quality. This presents serious challenges for those who believe in the fundamental equalising power of education. Parents living in poverty around the world see education as the ticket to social mobility for their children. This is often in tension with elites who are willing to invest large sums to give their own children an educational advantage in life. Seen in broader terms it becomes clear that, if more equal and fair societies are to be created, building more equal education systems is a fundamental bedrock. Today a radical shift is needed, requiring a renewed commitment from the international community and a rebuilding of confidence in the capacity of the governments to finance public education that is of good quality for all – and that can only come from a substantial scaling up of taxation and investment.

Authors

• Tanvir Muntasim, ActionAid

• David Archer, ActionAid