The Education for All – Fast Track Initiative officially became the Global Partnership for Education with an announcement and unveiling at the United Nations General Assembly in New York today. 

We have outgrown our original name and are changing it to better reflect who we are, what we do, and how we do it.  

This change builds on our successes over the last 10 years and is part of our redoubled commitment to making sure all children in low-income countries have access to quality education and opportunities to learn.

Since 2003, we’ve seen real impact: the Global Partnership for Education has helped 46 low-income countries, many of them affected by conflict or crisis, enroll 19 million children into school.  We’ve supported the construction of over 30,000 classrooms and trained over 337,000 teachers.  The Global Partnership gets more children into school, for a longer time and for a better education, especially for girls.  

The partnership and compact works.   Today, we are the only multilateral mechanism focused on funding the early years of primary and early secondary education.  We have fundamentally transformed international cooperation in education.  We’ve shown impressive achievements on increasing the quality and domestic funding of national education strategies, donor coordination on country-driven education plans and the injection of $2.1 billion in much-needed resources to meet bold targets in primary completion and girls education.

Our partnership model generates good will and good results and has become an example of aid effectiveness, where countries have both ownership and accountability. 

With this focus on renewed impact and partnership, we have made other changes too.  We have reformed our governance and structure to be more responsive and reflective, replacing the old donor-dominated Steering Committee with a Board of Directors where developing partner countries and NGOs hold more than half of the seats.

This change is about the future, looking at how we work together as partners to ensure that all children in poor countries have access to quality education and opportunities to learn.  I encourage you to check out our new logo,  learn more about our results and successes, our replenishment campaign for 2011-14 to reinvigorate political and economic support for education overall, and our renewed commitment to providing a  good quality education for all children.