This has been a great couple of months for the visibility and focus on helping all children get a good quality education: It’s now been three weeks since the United Nations Secretary General launched his five-year Education First initiative; That same week global education leaders endorsed the Action Plan: Education Cannot Wait focusing on protecting education in emergency and conflict situations; The Global Campaign for Education together with Education International launched its new campaign Every Child Needs a Teacher; The Education for All Global Monitoring Report launched the World Inequality Database in Education; The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) introduced its new three-year strategic plan; The Africa Progress Panel launched its policy brief A Twin Education Crisis is Holding Back Africa; This is Africa published the Access+: A focus on education in Africa; In collaboration with the Brookings Center for Universal Education the Africa Learning Barometer, and the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, pointed out his 10 key actions. These initiatives underline that promoting children’s education is not a matter of choosing one development issue over the other but education being an indispensable thread through the entire development agenda. The initiatives reflect the hard work of hundreds of committed individuals across many different agencies across the world to make a drumming noise for education: a call to action to make sure every girl and boy has an opportunity to learn and achieve their dreams. But what about the costs to achieve universal education? Whether this call will be loud enough to raise education funding to US$24 billion per year is unclear. That’s what is needed to provide 61 million children worldwide with access to primary education and 71 million youth access to lower secondary education. Will the call to action be strong enough to double the current amount of aid for education in emergencies and conflict? Based on the information released in the 2012 MDG Gap Task Force Report, achieving those funding levels will remain a challenge. The report shows that the volume of official development assistance (ODA) has declined as a consequence of the global economic crisis. The report describes a $167 billion gap between what donors actually disburse and what they have committed in accordance with the UN target of 0.7% of donor country gross national income (GNI). Moreover, the report finds that growth of core ODA is expected to stagnate between 2013 and 2015, reflecting the delayed impact of the global economic crisis on donor country budgets. David Archer, Head of Program Development at ActionAid and a member of the GPE Board of Directors, pointed out in a blog post that no commitments have been made or specific financial targets set to meet the funding needs for education (such as 20% of national budgets, 6% of a country’s GDP, or at least 10% of donor aid budgets). But in order to connect strategic vision with needed resources we need to find ways to increase–not just maintain–funding levels for education. And this is not the only challenge of the agenda for quality education. Equally important is the predictability of funding. Both aspects are crucial for planning and budgeting at the national government level (to build stronger education systems) and at the global level (to further promote effective sector development). Increased, more predictable long-term funding will, for example, be decisive in the quest to recruit, train and deploy 1.7 million additional teachers needed to see every primary school-aged child learning by 2015. Teachers are the most important partners to deliver education to all children, even in the most difficult circumstances. I will leave you with two quotes: From Irina Bokova, Head of UNESCO who declared: “Teachers are the real switchmen of history.” The other from David Archer : “Delivering on these financing targets and supporting inclusive decision-making processes in education need to be seen as the real tests of whether the UN, governments and donors are truly putting Education First into practice.”