Countdown to 2030: the new GEM Report approach to linking SDG 4 indicators to political and policy commitments

• In Event: Counting down to 2030: Analyzing the achievements and challenges of the global education goal (SDG 4)

Proposal

The presentation will first summarize the political developments around setting national targets on SDG indicators, which were developed to avoid the paralysis that overly aspirational global targets tend to bring in the past five years.
In recent years, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the GEM Report have supported countries to fulfil a commitment they made in 2015 to set national targets. Four in five countries have set such targets for 2025 and 2030 for eight SDG 4 indicators. Since 2023, through the SDG 4 Scorecard progress report, the UIS and the GEM Report have been monitoring how likely it is that countries will achieve their respective targets (UIS & GEM Report, 2023, 2024).
Specifically, countries were encouraged to set intermediate benchmarks for seven SDG 4 indicators in 2019: early childhood education attendance; out of school rate; completion rate; gender gaps in completion rate; minimum proficiency rate in reading and mathematics; trained teachers; and public education expenditure. Additionally, the SDG 4 High Level Steering Committee in 2022 urged countries to set benchmark indicators for three other global initiatives – digital transformation, greening education and youth participation (Antoninis, 2023).
Second, it will present a new approach to the next three GEM report cycles (2026, 2027 and 2028/9) in the run up to 2030.
The approach builds on the foundation of the national SDG 4 benchmarking process. The approach includes: (1) identification of a sample of countries that have improved (and a smaller group that have stagnated or regressed) on a set of education indicators in the past 10-20 years; (2) an account of why these countries have performed so well (or poorly); (3) a broad range of explanatory factors, as they emerge from case studies; and (4) a narrow range of policies that research has credited with having made a difference.
The first report (2026) will focus on access and equity indicators, data for which are much more abundant and relatively unambiguous as to the direction of countries' progress. The second report (2027) will focus on quality and learning indicators, data for which are not only scarce but often come with a considerable amount of error. The third report (2028/9) will focus on indicators where education interacts with other development outcomes where progress is less well documented.
One of the core objectives of the Countdown to 2030 series is to strengthen the buy-in by countries, so that the approach becomes an essential part of the overall approach to a post-2030 education and overall development agenda.

Author

• Manos Antoninis, Global Education Monitoring Report, UNESCO