Late last year, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), published a paper – “Financing for Sustainable Development: Implementing the SDGs through Effective Investment Strategies and Partnerships” – an important contribution in shaping a critical part of the post-2015 agenda to reduce poverty around the globe.

The SDSN paper calls upon the global community to create a new Global Fund for Education – one that can galvanize new international resources, create better cooperation, provide greater knowledge sharing and innovation, and focus on results. 

In our detailed response, the Global Partnership for Education agrees with the SDSN that a pooled global financing facility for education is essential to improve support to universal quality education, especially for the most vulnerable children. We also acknowledge the need for a stronger mechanism to leverage a greater focus on learning outcomes for all children, particularly the most marginalized.

However, what the education sector needs is not a new global fund for education.

Such an entity already exists: it is the Global Partnership for Education.

It’s time to reinforce and strengthen this existing partnership.

Galvanize global resources

As SDSN points out, some of the failure in education stems from a lack of clear goal setting and scarce innovative solutions. But a larger part of the challenge is due to the stark reality that, over the past 50 years, international financing for education, particularly basic education, has never been more than modest.

Yet in this context, the Global Partnership has substantially scaled up its funding, demonstrating that a robust mechanism is in place. Between 2012 and 2014, the Global Partnership approved more than US$2 billion in funding for partner countries - an amount similar to that approved for the entire 2004 to 2011 period. More than half of this amount was spent in fragile and conflict-affected countries, home to many of the world’s out of school children.

That’s still not enough to meet the growing demand from our developing country partners, but the Global Partnership has proven it can substantially and rapidly scale up disbursements to meet that need.

We’ve also changed the way we allocate and deliver our funding. 

Through our new results-based funding model, we now play a more catalytic role, by offering incentives for governments to focus on making concrete, externally validated gains in learning, equity and efficiency; strengthened evidence-based sector plans; data collection and proper monitoring of learning outcomes.

At the same time, the Global Partnership for Education has emerged as the largest funder of education in countries affected by conflict. We have demonstrated a capacity to delivery rapid and flexible funding when our partners experience crises and emergencies.

But the Global Partnership for Education recognizes that much more must be done to ensure good education for displaced populations.  

A rapid and coordinated funding response is needed during emergencies so that children’s learning is not interrupted – something that the SDSN paper does not mention. This is the one area that we feel most needs an innovative global solution.

Establish an inclusive multi-stakeholder model – with greater capacity for advocacy

The SDSN report recommends that all global funds be built as multi-stakeholder partnerships.

The Global Partnership is the largest multi-stakeholder partnership in education: donor and developing country governments, multilateral organizations, civil society groups, teachers, and private sector and foundations – representing 78 countries around the world, thousands of organizations, the major multilateral development banks and education-related UN agencies.

In addition, the Global Partnership for Education is now the world’s largest funder of education advocacy, having invested over $30 million since 2009 in over 50 national civil society coalitions to better enable grassroots groups, teacher associations and other citizen-led organizations to participate in the national education policy dialogue and monitor progress.

We support the SDSN call for stronger advocacy in education, and agree that more must be done to ensure a stronger and more coordinated international advocacy effort.

Take a systems approach to the crisis in learning

In our response to SDSN, we point out that a “systems and partnership approach” is essential if we are to solve the learning crisis.  Success in education requires the creation and maintenance of an effective system capable of fostering coordination across a wide range of actors – parents, communities, teachers, the developers and producers of curriculum and materials – over an extended period of time. That is why, at the country level, the Global Partnership brings together ministries, donor agencies and civil society behind a shared set of goals and an agreed plan.

It's important to remember that solving the learning crisis differs fundamentally from delivering a vaccine, which is a discrete intervention at a single point in time.

While there is wide scope for greater innovation in the education sector, for such innovations to have effect, a well-planned, staffed and coordinated learning system has to be in place to receive learners over a minimum period of 8 to 10 years.

SDSN’s suggestion that the global fund for education have special funding windows for different levels of education – a fund for early childhood, for secondary, etc. – would unnecessarily fragment and undercut the goals we are pursuing. We’ve seen often that targeted investments to promote innovation and problem solving in specific areas are best made in contexts where there is sound planning and, again, a system-wide approach to implementing reforms.

The SDSN paper also calls for a competitive system of grant allocation. The Education For All-Fast Track Initiative (the predecessor to the Global Partnership for Education) used a competitive process for decisions on grant allocation. The net result was that this approach failed to reach children living in the most dire circumstances, in particular those from countries affected by conflict and fragility, where capacity to develop strong proposals is more limited. The Global Partnership now marries needs-based allocations with a results based funding model, an arrangement that creates incentives for change while ensuring that transitional funding is available to support countries affected by crisis.

Bring about a data revolution based on principles of mutual accountability

We agree with SDSN that a stronger results focus – including accountability for financing and for learning outcomes – is an essential driver of change.

For that reason, the Global Partnership is investing – at the level of $32 million to date – in the development of better partnership-based approaches to monitor out-of-school children, leading an international effort to develop more rigorous responses to capture learning outcomes and pilot new methods for tracking public and international spending.

The SDSN report also rightly tackles the problem of developing clear evidence and data to support successful implementation. The Global Partnership has introduced the requirement for stronger data systems in its new funding model and is exploring innovative ways of supporting better national-level monitoring and evaluation.

Seize the opportunity

The SDSN’s suggestions to galvanize new international resources, create better cooperation, provide greater knowledge sharing and innovation and focus on results are welcome and essential to the future of the education sector.

The timing couldn’t be better. The new Sustainable Development Goals, which will be unveiled later this year, represent an opportunity to bring us closer to a day when all the world’s children will receive a quality education.

The Global Partnership for Education, which has gained important momentum and delivered significant results since its transformation in 2011, intends to work with valuable allies like the SDSN to seize that opportunity.