GPE 2025, GPE’s strategic plan for 2021–25, aims to deliver quality education for every child by mobilizing partnerships and investments that support education system reforms in partner countries.

Despite progress in some areas, such as a decline in gender gaps in the rates of out-of-school children and an improvement in the availability of qualified teachers at the pre-primary and primary levels, GPE partner countries continue to face the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and must accelerate progress to meet their national targets for Sustainable Development Goal 4.

GPE’s 2024 results report shows that GPE has stepped up its support to partner countries and is operating more efficiently amid this difficult context.

We are beginning to see progress in the reforms that partner countries are implementing with GPE support. The reforms articulated in partner country compacts (what we call “partnership compacts”) are more focused on addressing critical system barriers to transformation than previous efforts and are increasingly integrating gender equality.

With GPE support, partner countries are also implementing fundamental policy changes and strengthening institutions, especially in domestic financing, to enable successful reform implementation.

Record financing for country-led reforms

In fiscal year 2024, GPE nearly tripled grant approvals and doubled disbursements in support of partner countries’ reforms, compared to the previous year. As a result, both grant approvals and disbursements exceeded $1 billion in fiscal year 2024.

Nearly twice as much grant funding was approved to support gender equality activities in GPE 2025, totaling $1.3 billion, compared to GPE’s previous strategic plan—GPE 2020. Alongside increasing direct grant financing, GPE’s innovative financing tools leveraged almost $4 billion in additional financing since 2022—more than double the target for 2024.

GPE grants are successful, with 90% of the grants completed since the start of GPE 2025 meeting their objectives, including those related to learning outcomes, gender equality and inclusion.

Over the same period, GPE’s implementation grants distributed 169 million textbooks, trained 1.9 million teachers and constructed or rehabilitated 36,135 classrooms. The results achieved in the 3.5 years of GPE 2025 thus far have already exceeded the numbers achieved in the full implementation period of the previous strategy, GPE 2020 (2016-2020).

An area for improvement going forward is to create more standardized measurement of student learning results in GPE-funded programs that would allow us to assess the impact of our grants more consistently.

Priorities for the way forward to transform education

As GPE heads toward its next strategy, improving data on children’s learning remains an important opportunity. The world has 1.6 billion primary- and secondary-school-age children; for about 680 million of them, most of whom live in GPE partner countries, how much they learn is unknown.

The COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for partner countries to administer learning assessments. Consequently, the number of learning assessments in partner countries declined from 55 in 2019 to only 5 in 2022.

Nevertheless, 63 partner countries conducted large-scale assessments between 2015 and 2022, but only half of these countries reported any learning data to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). Data quality and comparability issues prevented the remaining partner countries from reporting.

Although all partnership compacts and most GPE grants already include measures to improve learning assessments, there is a need for continued technical and financial support for learning assessment systems, and the use of the learning data they produce to sustain them beyond the life of externally funded programs.

There’s also an opportunity to improve international reporting by incentivizing the harmonization and alignment of learning assessments to international standards.

These findings from the results report are shared with the partnership as part of GPE’s broader commitment to learning from evidence and accelerating progress toward quality education for every child.