Making progress on SDG 4: Lessons and reflections from key case studies

• In Event: Countdown to 2030 – Global Education Monitoring Report 2026: What explains progress in access to education in the past 20 years?

Proposal

Achieving the fourth Sustainable Development Goal – “Ensuring Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Promote Lifelong Learning Opportunities for All” - animates global governance efforts to align educational systems with the full suite of Sustainable Development Goals. Monitoring advancements resulting from these efforts is challenging on several fronts: first, SDG4 encompasses multiple objectives of different orders, from those related to improvement in educational access and quality in the core subjects of the curriculum, to those related to increased relevance in domains previously under-addressed, such as global citizenship and education for climate change. Secondly, most metrics capture national efforts, averages, and are relatively insensitive to important variation across subnational efforts, reflecting initiatives of state or provincial governments.

Relying on several case studies, this presentation will examine these challenges of ascertaining the contributions of SDG4 in animating educational development in more established as well as more transformational domains, as well as explore progress at the national as well as subnational levels. The presentation will examine the interplay of national and subnational (state or provincial) efforts in mediating the influence of SDG4 in the policy agenda. The analysis of various education reform efforts over the last decade will help examine how policies at the national and at the state level incorporated the core elements of SDG4, and will examine the programmatic implications of these priorities, and how those were implemented over time.

Author

• Fernando M. Reimers, Harvard University