I am writing this one hour after the Incheon Declaration was finally approved - and there is much to be celebrated at the World Education Forum (WEF) that is just ending in Korea. Getting so many different governments, agencies and organizations to agree to a common agenda is never easy. 

There is a strong re-assertion of education as a fundamental human right and a public good. There is also a reaffirmation that governments have the fundamental responsibility in implementing the agenda but with a clear commitment to accountability, transparency, participatory governance and coordinated partnerships at all levels. 

I welcome also the strong commitment to teachers who are “empowered, adequately recruited, well-trained, professionally qualified, motivated and supported”. It may be a little wordy but given the lack of attention to teachers in recent years this is important!

The NGO Forum, which preceded the WEF, involving over 300 people from around the world, laid out some important issues that can help to put flesh on the new agenda agreed.

Urgent need for more domestic and external financing for education

Whilst the precise targets will not be finalized until after the language of the education Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) has been agreed in New York in September, it is clear that this is an ambitious agenda. As such, more than anything else there will be an urgent need for mobilizing adequate domestic and external financing. 

The agreed declaration provides some foundation. It urges adherence to domestic allocations of “at least 4-6% of GDP and /or at least 15-20% of total public expenditure on education”. India, with support from Nigeria, Bangladesh and South Africa, urged that progress towards this should be contextual and incremental. In some respects this echoes the human rights obligation to progressively realize the right to education to the maximum of available resources. 

Civil society campaigners in each country will need to be vigilant to ensure that, in line with this, government budgets are indeed increasing year on year towards the agreed spending levels.

Tax justice is essential to ensure more domestic funding

The fuller document, the Incheon Framework for Action, provides more important guidance on domestic resource mobilization, calling for “widening the tax base (in particular by ending harmful tax incentives) preventing tax evasion”. The NGO Forum declaration goes further, stressing the need to address “aggressive tax avoidance, which though technically legal can be immoral in denying countries the funds needed for delivering on the right to education” and joining the call for the Financing for Development conference to create “an empowered intergovernmental body on tax which is mandated to set tax rules and empowered to enforce these rules – as a key step to ending the abuse of tax havens”.

If we are serious about securing financing for this new education agenda we will need to be working on all these issues – addressing both share of budgets going to education and the size of government budgets overall.

Improving aid effectiveness

Of course external finance will also play a crucial role in providing additional resources “to support implementation of the agenda according to countries’ needs and priorities”. The declaration calls for an increase in overseas development assistance, focusing support on the least developed countries.

It is a shame the declaration is not more explicit in calling for a doubling of aid to basic education or setting a benchmark of good practice of 10% of aid going to basic education as called for by the NGO Forum.

The call for “improving aid effectiveness through better coordination and harmonization is particularly relevant for the Global Partnership for Education. It is thus appropriate that the Global Partnership has been invited to be part of the future global coordination mechanism. This has implications for the next strategic plan of the Global Partnership, which will need to be explicit in supporting education sector plans addressing the full range of education targets, even if GPE resources are focused on basic education. The key will be in strengthening effective, inclusive and transparent country level processes.
The Incheon declaration says that education is “a main driver of development and in achieving the other proposed SDGs”.  But if we want education to be more than just one of 17 SDGs, indeed if it is to be seen as the heart of the future agenda, we need to make a more compelling case than has been made to date.

Fundamental changes are needed to achieve the 2030 vision of sustainable development and this requires all generations to become active global citizens with new knowledge, new attitudes and new behaviors. Education, starting from birth and continuing throughout life, is the essential catalyst for such a transformation.