The expiration of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals is fast approaching. One of the goals is a promise to the children of the world that each of them would have access to a free primary school education. Unfortunately, the international community is short of fulfilling this promise.

While we have made great progress, around 250 million children in the world either fail to make it to grade 4 or do not reach the minimum level of reading, writing, and doing math.

Many of these children are the hardest to reach: children in fragile and conflict-affected states, children in rural areas, and children with disabilities and girls.

Compounding this access and learning crisis is a dearth of solid education data in many poor countries, which seriously hampers efforts to build effective national education systems.

And to add one more serious problem: there has been an alarming 5% decrease in aid to education between 2010 and 2012, seven times the rate of decline of overall global development aid.

This is unacceptable. We, the international community, have to act now and we have to act firmly. Without a greater focus on adequate financing in education, our gains will be elusive and millions of children will still miss out. Inevitably, the pattern of who misses out will entrench the current education inequalities between girls and boys, children in urban and rural regions, and for children with disabilities. No government can afford to reduce national investments in education. Nor can donors step back from unlocking the full potential of education by cutting down on their funding promises.

Supporting the Global Partnership for Education’s Replenishment

The Global Partnership for Education plays a leadership role by supporting transformational changes in education systems that benefit all children. It is uniquely placed to harness the potential of its diverse partners and mobilize their joint efforts to get all children in the poorest countries of the world in school and learning.

On June 26, 2014, the Global Partnership will hold its Second Replenishment Pledging Conference hosted by the European Union in Brussels. This will be the final push to accelerate progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals and Education For All goals. But the pledges that will be made by donor countries, developing countries, and multilateral organizations will also leverage support for an ambitious post-2015 agenda.

There are three key actions that the Global Partnership for Education asks of its partners:

A new funding model for a new development era

To make sure that this new funding is well spent, the Global Partnership is adopting a ground-breaking new funding model for the 2015 to 2018 replenishment period. The new model builds on significant reforms the partnership has implemented over recent years and will, many believe, become a widely used approach for 21^st-century collaborative development.

At its heart, the funding model provides incentives to developing countries to create more efficient and effective education systems, to prioritize learning outcomes, to increase domestic investment in education, and to collect and use more and better data, which promotes accountability and efficacy. This new approach strongly emphasizes country ownership, a key principle of development aid effectiveness.

Putting the new funding model in practice will open new perspectives for effective development, and we can achieve major improvements:

• Significant additional financing, both domestic and external
• Increased efficiency and effectiveness of education systems targeting key issues of equity and quality as well as access
• Greater alignment and more equitable allocation of all sources of education sector funding in GPE partner countries
• Systemic and more durable reforms that give more children access to good quality education
• A long-overdue data revolution spearheaded, enabling developing country partners to collect more and better data to increase accountability and improve the effectiveness of education outcomes

Education pays off

At a time when the world faces many threats and challenges, the failure to invest in education and the failure to address inequalities in education could have considerable global costs. Good quality education amplifies and sustains the impact of efforts across all areas of human, economic and social development. Education is the cornerstone to success of the post-2015 development agenda.

Let us remember the 250 million children who are either unable to reach grade 4 or don’t get to learn the basics of literacy and numeracy.

We have the chance to help these children.

For me, these are 250 million reasons to invest in education.

With US$3.5 billion from 2015 to 2018, the Global Partnership aims to achieve the following outcomes:

• Twenty-nine million children in both primary and lower secondary schools will go to school for four years and get a good quality education. 23 million of those children will be in fragile and conflict-affected states
• The number of children who don’t complete primary education annually will decrease from 7.6 million in 2014 to 4.8 million in 2018
• The primary completion rate of girls will increase from 74% in 2014 to 84% in 2018.
• The lower secondary completion rate for girls will increase from 44% in 2014 to 54% in 2018.
• The number of children who complete primary education annually and demonstrate core reading and numeracy skills will increase by 25%, from 16 million in 2014 to 20 million in 2018
• Primary and lower secondary school drop-out rates will decline by 10%
• Primary and lower secondary school repetition rates will decline by 10%
• Developing country partners’ domestic education expenditures will increase by US$16 billion