“I see that there is a problem that signals a governance issue, a breakdown in supervision and oversight by the Minister and I have to intervene” said the Prime Minister before the House of Representatives, as the news broke.

The case unfolded with the questioning in an audit of the Ministry of Education conducted by the Auditor General’s Department (AGD). The audit is focused on “whether the selected public entities procurement and contracts management activities were conducted to attain value for money (which encompasses the achievement of economy, efficiency and effectiveness)”.

Source: AGD website

In the 2017/8 GEM Report we showed the importance of horizontal accountability mechanisms, such as audits, for exposing corruption, or mis-management within governments. They can also go beyond assessing compliance to audit performance, examining whether service provision is efficient and effective, whether policies and spending align with wider government and sector objectives, and whether organizational decision-making is sound. Poland’s Supreme Audit Office has carried out audits on issues ranging from the use of public funds for education institutions and research to the education of Polish citizens living abroad. The Swedish National Audit Office’s audit of the role of tertiary education institutions in providing lifelong learning opportunities led to a recommendation to the government to review incentive structures for such institutions.

Performance audits are increasingly common even in middle income countries. The Royal Audit Authority of Bhutan identified deficiencies in the school feeding programme and recommended setting standard dietary requirements, adapting menus accordingly and establishing a quality control system with an independent assessor.

Unfortunately, often the oversight function of audit mechanisms is not effective, which has partly to do with capacity. In Bangladesh, there was an average delay of 5 years before government agencies responded to audit observations on primary education and 10 years on secondary, for instance. In Sri Lanka, the Committee on Public Accounts demands follow-up on objections raised by the auditor general. For example, action against the director of an education department has been recommended, yet there has been no follow-up

Outside of public accounts committees, permanent committees on education in the legislatures can help hold governments to account, even though in practice their roles vary between countries. Analysis in the 2017/8 GEM Report of New Zealand, Norway, Peru, the United States and Zambia showed that committees usually carried out ex post reviews and provided oversight on legislation and executive actions, e.g. scrutinizing government actions, reviewing existing laws and recommending changes.

In short, while the facts are still unfolding, the case in the news in Jamaica at present shows how important it is for countries to invest in strong institutions to detect and deter corruption in education. The risk of corruption in all sectors and all levels require accountability mechanisms to be taken seriously. Our 2017/8 GEM Report is a good place to find out more about them.

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The GEM 2017/8 Report, which focused on accountability in education, paid special attention to the role of the media. Every country has assorted formal institutional checks and balances to ensure governments exercise their authority in a way compatible with their commitments, ranging from auditors to parliamentarians. But within a broader political process, informal efforts also serve to hold governments accountable for their commitments, policies and results.

The media can be a key partner in holding governments to account

It is here that the role of the media is critical. The efforts of reporters involve the free flow of information to ensure transparency. People need the media to form and express informed views.

The media have huge potential to raise the visibility of education issues, putting pressure on education actors to meet their responsibilities and pursue policy change. By exposing evidence and directing focus, they can set the agenda for the public and policy-makers.

Media publications offer ways to familiarize the public with education research otherwise accessible only to specialists, and to express dissenting views on established policy decisions. Examples include The New York Times questioning the effectiveness of performance-based pay and The Guardian examining the design of criteria used to assess the effectiveness of tertiary education.

The media have played a role in investigating wrongdoing and reporting potential cases of corruption. For example, in Brazil journalists have covered abuses to the national basic education equalization fund. In Nigeria, newspapers have publicized allegations of ghost teachers or teachers collecting more than their official salary. In India, news networks have carried out investigative work to expose fraud and unprofessional practice in medical training institutions.

In Switzerland, the national public broadcaster Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen questioned the independence of 12 leading universities because of their sponsorship deals, especially within the pharmaceutical industry, and the potential conflicts of interest. It exposed the differences in transparency standards among universities and revealed that one pharmaceutical company reserved the right to alter research results. The findings sparked a national debate on making these contractual arrangements publicly available.

Increasing the flow of information through the media about funding allocation can help empower the public and increase pressure on education officials to act responsibly. In the late 1990s, Uganda’s government initiated a newspaper campaign to publish information on the amount and timing of capitation grant disbursements by the central government to school districts. A decrease in distance of 2.2 km to a newspaper outlet increased the share of funding that reached a school by nearly 10 percentage points.

In Madagascar, the grant received by 20% of schools in 2002/3 did not correspond with the declared amount sent by the district. Anecdotal evidence suggested the funds were diverted to non-education purposes or used privately by local officials. Campaigns via newspapers, radio and television led to the decreased probability of such local exposure, although the impact depended on local literacy rates. Where illiteracy was widespread, the impact of newspapers and poster campaigns was limited, while radio and television were more efficient.

In Mexico, the 2013 National Census of Schools, Teachers and Students of Basic and Special Education revealed some 39,000 teachers nobody had seen or known at their purported workplaces. The results were reported in major national and international media outlets, including El Universal, Milenio and The Wall Street Journal. The Secretariat of Public Education revised its administrative records to update personnel statistics and investigated those who were being paid but not working.

In the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, an analysis of tertiary education news in 1998–2007 showed the media regularly reported on corruption, including bribes, cheating and plagiarism, but was mostly silent on ethical issues, such as sexual and other misconduct and abuse of public property. There was a stronger emphasis on fraud, plagiarism and cheating in UK and US media, while Russian media focused on bribery in admissions and degree completion.

The media need to be up to the task

In times of rapid change in education, exposing problems and publicizing information are important media functions to ensure government accountability in education. Yet to achieve these and reflect diverse social views, the media need to be independent, competent, reflective, democratic and accountable – qualities often lacking, resulting in public distrust. A survey in 36 countries showed that less than half of respondents (43%) trusted the media and almost one-third (29%) avoided the news. While expansion of the internet and social media may have exacerbated the problem, the underlying drivers of mistrust in many countries have much to do with a politically polarized media landscape. Concentrated ownership, but also restrictions on press freedom, lead to perceptions of media bias.

In many countries, the quality of reporting may be poor. In addition to reflecting inherent bias, the media determine what qualifies as newsworthy. The skills of those researching, analysing, organizing and writing or broadcasting news play an important role in reporting quality. For example, the wide coverage of national and international learning assessments tends to be simplistic, emphasizing league tables and rankings instead of providing more nuanced analysis of causes, caveats and policy implications for which governments can be reasonably held to account.

3 May aims to remind governments of the need to respect their commitment to press freedom but is also, in turn, a day of reflection among media professionals about press freedom and the issues of ethical standards. It is also a day of support for media organisations and the role they play in all spheres of life, including education.

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The Global Action Week for Education (GAWE) embraces the 2018 theme Accountability for SDG4 and the slogan “Keep your promises for education!”. We call on governments to demonstrate political will by producing national education monitoring reports annually as an accountability tool for their citizens. The Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE) has embarked on a series of mobilization and advocacy actions in the region.

CLADE: Mobilised for GAWE 2018

CLADE intends to support and encourage public debates on the setbacks and advances in the fulfilment of the right to education in each country, involving the media, education communities and other social sectors. Activities, messages and key demands of GAWE 2018 will be disseminated through the regional blog www.same2018.org and social media channels. CLADE urges its national member forums to demand from the national authorities the organization of public debates on the implementation of the human right to education and the development of regular official monitoring reports, which would also report on the compliance with this right, with an active and significant participation of civil society.

GAWE 2018 will serve as a step in the preparation for the next High Level Political Forum (HLPF), which will take place in July 2018 in New York, where the following countries will present their national voluntary reports: Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay.

CLADE will also be producing a state of the region report on the compliance with the Sustainable Development Goal on Education (SDG 4) for Latin America and the Caribbean. This report will be presented at the Regional Meeting of Ministers of Education in Sucre, Bolivia, in July 2018.

The organisation will aim to popularise the #MakeitPublic campaign by continuously monitoring the fulfilment of commitments made in national education plans and towards SDG 4 in the region, with emphasis on the commitments on inclusive education and education financing: the States of the region signed the obligation to invest at least 4-6% of GDP and 15-20% of their total public budget in education. These monitoring fronts are driven, respectively, through the Regional Observatory of Inclusive Education (OREI), and the Monitoring System for the Financing of the Human Right to Education in Latin America and the Caribbean.

GAWE in the Dominican Republic: For the fulfilment of educational goals, transparency and accountability of the state to the citizens

At the same time and in the context of the GAWE celebrations in the Dominican Republic, the Socio-educational Forum (Foro Socio Educativo – FSE), member of CLADE and GCE in this country, has planned several activities focusing on SDG4 and the mobilisation of civil society around the #MakeitPublic campaign, calling government to continue producing the national education monitoring reports annually and improve its qualiy.

They range from the distribution of stickers, posters, guides for educational centers and brochures at the pavilion of the Ministry of Education of the Dominican Republic (MINERD) during the National Fair of the Book; to organising interviews with officials of MINERD, decentralized institutes and other organizations on the implementation of SDG 4 in the Dominican Republic; to the meeting of a panel with experts on the theme “Four years of the signing of the National Pact for Educational Reform. Have we made progress in the implementation?”, with a view to evaluating the progress, limitations and challenges on the implementation of these commitments and the coordination of the linked social actors.

A new bulletin of the Observatory of the Budget in Education (an initiative promoted by the FSE) will be also released. With the title “The gender focus in education in the Dominican Republic, legal framework and reality in schools. The budget execution of the MINERD of 2017”, the document will be presented to education officials and members of the education community of the Municipality of Tamayo, Bahoruco, on May 3, 2018.

Beyond the GAWE, the FSE has been acting permanently in monitoring the results of different education policies and programs in the country, as well as in monitoring the quality of national educational spending. These actions are driven in line with the National Development Strategy 2030 and the Goals of the Education Agenda 2030.

Thus, the Dominican Republic joins the celebration of the GAWE 2018 under the national slogan “2030 Educational Goals: Transparency and Accountability to Citizenship. Keep your Promises!”.

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The second report in the GEM Report series, Accountability in education: meeting our commitments, shows that achieving SDG 4 is a shared responsibility between us all – governments, schools, teachers, parents, students, private actors and the international community. But the type of accountability countries choose to set up for these responsibilities must be designed carefully. Accountability must be used as a mean to education ends, such as equity and quality, it cautions, and not seen as an end in itself.

People are more likely to deliver if held accountable for decisions. If held accountable for outcomes beyond their control, they will try to avoid risk, minimize their role or adjust their behaviour in unintended ways to protect themselves, which may mean leaving the weakest learners behind.

Rushing to conclusions, for example exclusively blaming teachers  for absenteeism, is often unconstructive and unjust. In Indonesia in 2013/14 for example, nearly half of teacher absenteeism was due to excused time for study for which replacements should have been provided. Similarly, in Senegal, only 12 of the 80 missed school days in 2014 were due to teachers avoiding their responsibilities.

The Director of the Report, Manos Antoninis, will be telling 30 ministers of eduation at the Innovation Summit Maputo, Mozambique, today that “if a government is too quick to apportion blame to others, it is likely deflecting attention away from its own responsibility for creating a strong, supportive education system.”

This is because accountability starts with governments, which are responsible for fulfilling the right to education. Strong independent bodies such as ombudsmen, parliaments and audit institutions are needed to hold them to account for education. Monitoring and evaluation of education progress must also become more systematic, yet only one in six governments prepare a regular annual education monitoring report for public scrutiny.

These mechanisms are particularly critical for preventing abuse of power for private gain. In the European Union in 2009-2014, 38% of education and training tenders only had one bidder, compared to 16% of tenders in the construction sector, indicating that the risk of corruption is higher in education than in the building industry.

Setting and enforcing regulations ranging from contract tendering to teacher qualifications are also crucial, argues the Report. There are no regulations on class sizes in almost half of countries. Yet, regulations are often aspirational in poorer countries. Fewer than half of low and middle income countries had standards for early childhood education and just a handful had mechanisms to monitor compliance.

The enforcement of regulations is often too weak in countries experiencing a fast growth of private schools and universities. In Lagos, Nigeria, only 26% of private schools had been approved by the State Ministry of Education. In countries with weak accreditation processes for higher education, thousands of students graduate with unrecognized degrees. But countries are also strengthening compliance mechanisms. In Kenya and Uganda, private schools were operating without qualified teachers and with inadequate infrastructure before regulations were put in place and courts shut them down.

Where formal mechanisms for accountability fail, the Report calls on citizens to continue holding governments to account for meeting their right to education. In Colombia, a citizens’ campaign successfully challenged the government in court leading to the establishment of free education. In the United States, parents and media successfully lobbied for the removal of climate change denial from textbooks, and students in South Africa were able to halt university tuition hikes.

Accountability matters

The Report emphasizes the importance of accountability in addressing persistent education problems. Globally, less than 20% of countries legally guarantee 12 years of free and compulsory education. There are 264 million children and youth out of school and 100 million young people are currently unable to read. Little is known about the education of 250 million people, mostly vulnerable and disadvantaged, who are excluded from household surveys. No one is accountable for the education of this invisible population.

There is also another accountability vacuum, with donors not delivering on their aid commitments for those in need and aid to education stagnant since 2010. The Report also calls for donors to be careful in making aid available through results-based mechanisms that shift risk to countries that are the least prepared to bear it.

No approach to accountability will be successful without a strong enabling environment that provides actors with adequate resources, capacity, motivation and information to fulfil their responsibilities. The Report calls on governments to:

1. Design accountability for schools and teachers that is supportive and formative and avoids punitive mechanisms, especially those based on narrow performance measures.
2. Develop credible and efficient regulations with associated sanctions for all education providers, public and private, that ensure non-discrimination and the quality of education.
3. Make the right to education justiciable, which is not the case in 45% of countries.
4. Be transparent about the strengths of weaknesses of education systems, opening policy processes to broad and meaningful consultation and publishing a regular education monitoring report.

View presentations: Monitoring, Thematic

Download the Report or its summary.

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By Camilla Croso, President, Global Campaign for Education

In 2015, the world committed to a Sustainable Development Goal to achieve equitable, inclusive and free quality education and lifelong learning for all. This was the result of negotiation, research, and sustained citizen-led campaigning – all steeped in fifteen years of experience from the Education for All movement. It is now time for governments to prove they are working to realise the new SDG targets on education. It is time to deliver.

This week is the Global Campaign for Education’s Global Action Week, which provides an annual opportunity for citizens worldwide to act as a targeted, united force for change. This year, we are asking citizens and governments alike to Stand Up for Education, by ensuring accountability for Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4), and enabling active citizen participation.

Challenges in delivering the goal

Despite education being a critical enabler of other human rights, it has long faced many hurdles. Recent geo-political shifts have challenged the process of global consensus-building, which is vital for the realisation of the SDGs. At the same time, we are bearing witness to continued and worsening conflict. And we are finding stronger barriers to civil society taking an active role in holding governments to account, with reports of aggressive action to limit civil society activity. Citizens must have a voice in any decision-making process, which impacts their lives, at all levels; this is critical – and intrinsic – to the realisation of the SDGs.

A longer-term challenge is the financing of education: a combination of reduced aid to education, and insufficient domestic resources in developing countries, has left 263 million children and youth out of school, and 758 million adults unable to read or write.

Opportunities for change 

To deliver education on the ground, national attention must focus on the status of education, and political will must be leveraged. While GCE has expressed its profound disagreement with regressive measures – for example, the recently approved constitutional change in Brazil that freezes the education budget for twenty years – we are also focusing on upcoming opportunities for ensuring commitments are upheld. Here are several important areas of action:

National and provincial elections are to be held in many countries: in France, Coalition Éducation has asked election candidates to pledge to increase aid to education; in the US, in the wake of the elections, GCE-US has garnered the support of 90 Members of Congress to support global education; and in Ecuador, Contrato Social por la Educación has engaged candidates to step up to commitments made in the international arena.

GCE members are also mobilising to participate in the UN´s Voluntary National Reviews, which governments are completing to report on their progress in implementing the SDGs. GCE has produced a new briefing to support coalitions to work towards this objection.

Education civil society actors are organising themselves at the global level in the accountability processes for the SDGs: GCE, along with Education International, the International Council for Adult Education, and the European Students’ Union, represent an Organising Partner for the newly-formed Education and Academia Stakeholder Group, which has a formal role in the UN accountability structures and reports into the High-level Political Forum, the UN’s central platform for follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Global Action Week for Education offers a broad opportunity for change by inciting individuals and organisations to mobilise their networks, constituents, and friends to take part.

In Latin America, Foro Socioeducativo in the Dominican Republic is running numerous activities including the launch of the Guide on Education Policies for Educational Institutions – which aims to make explicit the alignment of the SDG4 targets with the national education plan, a workshop and seminar on the implementation of SDG4 and the progress and challenges in delivering the Education Agenda 2030, a paper on aligning SDG4 with the national education agenda, and several round tables, debates and reflections on different aspects of education.

In the Middle East, the Yemeni coalition, Yemen Coalition for Education for All, is collecting 100,000 signatures demanding that the government and international organisations fulfil their promises concerning the implementation of SDG4. The coalition has also coordinated with the Ministry of Education so that all schools on 29 April will hear morning speeches on SDG4, the government’s accountability, and the commitment of the Ministry to the pledges. In addition, a newsletter on accountability will be distributed in schools and universities.

In Africa, the Tanzania Education Network/Mtandao wa Elimu Tanzania (TEN/MET) held a meeting with reporters updating them on activities to be held in Nanyumbu (Mtwara Region) over the course of this week. This will include school/community awareness in Nanyumbu villages, calling upon all stakeholders to be responsible for improving the quality of education in the district. Mass demonstrations and public meetings have already taken place in Mtwara.

In Asia, the Philippines national coalition, E-Net, is advocating for the whole SDG4 agenda, and demanding that overlooked targets on early childhood, and on youth and adults be given due attention in implementation policies. At the same time, there are demands to increase education financing and ensure efficiency and effectiveness of the education budget. The coalition will hold a public display of the SDG4 targets, a forum on the role of different SDG4 stakeholders and a workshop on early childhood care and development.

In Europe, the Albanian Coalition for Child Education launched Global Action Week in the Centre for Openness and Dialogue in Tirana, with representatives from the Office of the Prime Minister. The coalition is also holding open forums with young people in 8 regions, and running a public consultation with CSOs and Ministry of Education on the education budget.

From Colombia to Vietnam, Norway to Togo, many different activities are taking place. It is no exaggeration to say that millions of citizens worldwide are standing up for education this week and demanding that their governments deliver.

The education community, in particular the education civil society movement, campaigned hard to ensure that the SDG4 goal and targets and ED2030 Framework for Action are rights-based and encompass the full extent of the education agenda. While we strongly support all efforts made to improve the level and quality of learning, accountability cannot be reduced to measures of testing and teacher performance. Our struggle for accountability in the coming years spotlights the role and responsibility of governments as duty-bearers, who must protect, respect and fulfil the right to inclusive, quality, public and free education for all.

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Mohammed arrived eight months ago in Zaatari, which has become the world’s second-largest refugee complex as more and more Syrians flee the civil war. “I was teaching in my school until it was completely destroyed, then I moved to another school. Once all schools in the area had been completely destroyed, then I left and came to Zaatari.”

Four months ago he got a job teaching. “Save the Children had a recruitment for schools and I applied for the job. They hired me because of my experience and because I have a university degree and have been teaching for 12 years.”

“My school is primary and secondary combined. Girls in the morning, boys in the afternoon. There are 800 students in primary and 400 students in secondary school.

“There are 25 to 40 in each class at my school, school 2. In school 1, there are from 80 to 120 in classes because it’s in one of the most densely populated areas of the camp. Zaatari is a massive, massive place. It takes a couple of hours to walk across the camp.”

“Our main problems are the shortage of text books, we need boards and markers,” Mohammed says, adding, “The school doesn’t look like a school. I want a yard where children can play. We want our school to look like other schools.”

Despite the difficulties, Mohammed says the majority of children in the camp are in school. “There are 50,000 children in the camp in total. Half of them are school-aged children and 20,000 are currently registered with a school. Some have missed up to three school years. It’s important they are enrolled into school.”

Globally, as we outlined in a policy paper last year, many children in or from countries affected by conflict don’t have a chance to go to school. Around half the world’s out-of-school population lives in conflict-affected countries, up from 42% in 2008.

The education systems of many countries embroiled in conflict are overlooked in the international aid structure, receiving neither long-term development assistance nor short-term humanitarian aid. The global education community has been calling for 4% of humanitarian aid to be allocated to education. Yet as we showed in the 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report, the share of humanitarian aid for education has declined. In 2012, education accounted for just 1.4% of humanitarian aid, down from 2.2% in 2009.

Although you could hardly say Mohammed and the children he teaches are lucky, they have at least been able to receive help from United Nations agencies such as UNICEF and NGOs like Save the Children, which detailed the effects of the Syrian war in a report this year, A Devastating Toll: The impact of three years of war on the health of Syria’s children.

“We have received training how to teach the Jordanian curriculum,” Mohammed says. “UNICEF also gave us a course on how to be a good teacher. They are training other teachers at the end of March. It’s a good course.”

Save the Children also helps children who have been traumatized by their experiences. “We have many aggressive students because of the situations they faced during the crisis and supporting children in the camp with psychosocial support is important,” Mohammed says.

“Save the Children have their own caravan with some toys and they do some activities with the children to relieve the tension that they have. They give psychosocial support. We identify children who need support and direct them to the centres. There are over 60 centres in the camp.”

Mohammed say schools in Syria are being deliberately attacked and used as bases by fighting forces. In the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education, we drew attention to attacks on schools and the need to heighten human rights protection for education.

The United Nations Security Council subsequently put its weight behind one of the major recommendations of the report, when it unanimously adopted Resolution 1998 in July 2011. The resolution recognizes attacks on schools as grave violations of human rights, adding them to the crimes for which government forces and armed militias can be named in the UN secretary-general’s annual report on children and armed conflict.

“Some of the children are still scared of school because they saw their schools being destroyed because of bombing and think the schools here are like those in Syria,” Mohammed says. “Some of the schools were occupied by some of the fighting groups.”

“My school was attacked at night so neither the students nor teachers were there. They bombed the whole village that time and they destroyed the school because it was in the area.”

Mohammed underlines the need for humanitarian aid to focus more on education. “I wish that people keep supporting us here in the camp. The support by organisations like UNICEF and Save the Children in the camp is going very well but we still need more support. I hope we get back to Syria and if it lasts longer than I expect, I hope the standard of the school gets better here so that it’s good for our children.

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Without a clearer definition of “aid”, in other words, the targets to which countries commit themselves are largely meaningless – and the countries that really need aid are not benefiting. So it’s timely that the rules set back in 1969 about what counts as aid –the OECD’s definition of “official development assistance”– are up for review later this year.

Education has much to gain from clearer, fairer new rules. Currently, as shown in our recently released 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report, a quarter of direct aid to education never leaves donor countries, equivalent to $3.2 billion over the year 2010-2011. These funds are instead spent on scholarships and “student imputed costs” – the costs of foreign students studying in universities in donor countries. And, while much of the aid in the form of technical assistance is used to support governments in development countries, there is always a component that is spent in the donor country – but this distinction is currently not possible based on the available aid statistics. 

In addition, the money going to scholarships has also mostly been going to upper middle income countries. From 2010-2011, China was the largest recipient of scholarship-related aid, receiving around a fifth of the total. This “aid” to China totaled more than the aid received by some of the poorest countries for basic education. For instance, on average over 2010–2011, donors – primarily Germany and Japan – disbursed US$656 million per year to China for scholarships and student imputed costs, which was 77 times the amount of aid disbursed to Chad for basic education over the same period, and 37 times the amount given to Niger.

The current elastic definition of aid also covers a kind of donor contribution can actually harm rather than help: 15% of aid is in the form of loans that countries have to pay back at concessional interest rates. This deprives poorer countries of resources that they could spend on education.

To make matters worse,  loans with an interest rate of 10% are deemed ‘concessional’ under current rules, but with market rates at a historic low of around 3% to 5%, these ‘concessions’ are not concessional at all. At the extreme, donors may even be making interest on the ‘aid’ they’re giving to poorer countries. It is clearly time for the definition of aid to be tightened.

The aid landscape would change dramatically if new definitions of aid excluded amounts spent on scholarships and loans. Germany, the largest donor of direct aid to education in 2010–2011, would fall to fifth place, and France would drop two places to fourth-largest. The World Bank would fall from third to 14^th place, since a large share of its funding is in the form of loans. The United Kingdom and United States, which give negligible amounts of aid to education in the form of loans or student imputed costs, would jump from sixth and seventh places to first and second.

To build a full picture of financing for education, it is also important to give countries credit for the aid that they contribute via pooled funds. For example, donors should report the amount they give to the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and, likewise, the GPE should report what it disburses to countries.  In 2011, GPE was the fourth-largest donor to low and lower middle income countries. If the GPE’s funds increase after its forthcoming replenishment meeting, as we hope, it will be even more important that the way these funds are distributed is centrally reported.

Once we have agreed on the definition of aid, we must then also be sure that the contributions are targeting those most in need. There are vast inequalities in progress towards education goals. Our latest report shows that the poorest girls are 60 years behind the richest boys in achieving universal completion of primary school, for example. If we are to rectify these huge gaps in progress in education after 2015, we must be sure to agree on what constitutes real aid, and then target our resources – financial and technical – to those most in need.

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