By Ben Hewitt, Director of Campaigns and Communications, Theirworld
By the year 2030, more than half of the world's 1.6 billion young people will never have been to school, dropped out of school or left education without even the most basic skills needed for employment. These are dangerous and costly predictions in an already unstable world. If that doomsday scenario is going to be avoided, action is needed. Now.
That's why a group of major charities and organisations - including Theirworld, Save the Children, ONE, Avaaz and Global Citizen – have come together to call on world leaders meeting at the G20 in Germany to launch a new way of providing the funding needed to educate millions of children and give them a better chance in life. Together we are calling for education now.
There is currently a global cash crisis for education. Around the world there is currently less than $10 per child per year made available in aid for education, barely enough for a textbook. It is nowhere near enough.
This vast gap in funding will require an equally vast funding plan on a scale never seen before in global education. But the message from the campaigning education charities is that there is a plan and its achievable if leaders act now.
“the message from the campaigning education charities is that there is a plan and its achievable if leaders act now”
We know things can be different: Recent research from the influential Education Commission shows that if all nations improve education as quickly and effectively as the 25% best-performers in their income brackets, with the additional financial support from the international community needed, all children in low and middle-income countries could have access to quality education within a generation.
A student sits in the library of the Kibera School For Girls in Nairobi, Kenya
There are three steps to the plan. Step one is for governments of low and middle-income countries to expand their domestic tax base and increasing education spending to 6% of GDP. This is a crucial first step.
Second, donor governments need to increase their share of aid going to education to 15% of all aid and invest more multilaterally, in line with health spending. This funding should be supporting the Global Partnership for Education and Education Cannot Wait fund to reach their full potential.
There is no government that can legitimately argue against these actions in the face of all the evidence, especially in regards to the transformative impact of girls education and the need to provide eduction to children caught up in emergencies.
But the really big ticket item missing is the leveraging of additional funding, so the third step is to establish a new International Financing Facility for Education (IFFEd) to bridge the funding gap needed to make a real difference. That mechanism alone would mobilise $10 billion or more of additional funding each year by 2020 and upwards of $20 billion by 2030.
This is why NGOs and civil society organisations have this week called on the G20 leaders to make education financing a top priority at their forthcoming meeting - by calling on the World Bank, regional development banks and donors to establish an International Finance Facility for Education.
More than 30 NGOs and Civil Society organisations have already added their names to an open letter to G20 leaders and the demand is growing daily. The letter says that “A transformational shift is needed in the way we invest in education systems if we want a safe, secure and prosperous future for the next generation". Only today we added names from organisations in Pakistan, Kenya, and India and the demand is building. Together we are saying that a major finance gap exists that "requires us to mobilise funding beyond traditional donors”.
Things that no child should ever experience are responsible for locking many out of education. War and natural disasters affect 75 million children of school age directly every year.
Syrian refugees in Lebanon return to school.
Around 150 million children are out of school and engaged in child labour, vulnerable to trafficking and exposed to abuse. Young girls in countries where poverty, crisis and conflict mix with cultural restrictions, may never start school in the first place.
Two years ago, nearly 200 countries signed up to ‘ensure inclusive and quality education’ for every single child on the planet by 2030. This is a promise made to children. NOW is the time to start making that promise a reality. And we have a plan how to do it.
Ben Hewitt is Director of Campaigns and Communications at Theirworld. For more information about the campaign go to theirworld.org