Results
Report
2024
The Results Report 2024 presents progress against the GPE 2025 strategy. It highlights the work of the partnership through the latest data available.
The world is still experiencing an acute learning crisis, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and fueled by various crises, affecting millions of children in lower-income countries. Too many children still don't go to school or haven't learned enough when they leave school.
Still, education is the cornerstone of economic and social development, fair and equitable growth, and the key to unlocking innovation, resilience and stability.
In this context, GPE continues to support partner countries' implementation of their selected priority reforms through coordination, technical assistance and financing.
GPE strengthened support to partner countries over the past year.
Since 2022, GPE grants have reached 253 million children, accounting for close to 40% of school-aged children in 76 countries. Of those children, 70% live in partner countries affected by fragility and conflict.
Since 2021, the programs funded by GPE grants distributed 169 million textbooks, trained 1.9 million teachers and constructed or rehabilitated 36,000 classrooms.
The results achieved in the last four years already exceed those achieved in the five years of the previous strategic plan (2016-2020). Nearly 90% of the grants that closed since the start of GPE 2025 met their objectives.
million textbooks distributed
million teachers trained
classrooms built or renovated
In FY 2024, GPE nearly tripled grant approvals and doubled disbursements. This result was driven by better alignment with partner countries' processes, a larger pool of accredited grant agents and the ongoing simplification of the operating model.
Since 2022, GPE has raised $4 billion in additional financing for education through the Multiplier, its innovative finance mechanism. This is more than double the target for 2024. The additional funds come from an increasingly diverse range of cofinanciers.
Innovative financing
$0 million
in approved Multiplier allocations
$0 billion
leveraged from
0 cofinanciers
64% of GPE grants are harmonized with other sources of external finance for education, a steady increase since 2021, reflecting in part the success of the GPE Multiplier.
All GPE cross-national mechanisms—Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX), Education Out Loud, and technical assistance initiatives—exceeded their targets for 2024.
GPE's focus on gender equality is on the right track for transforming education systems.
Gender gaps in rates of out-of-school children have declined steadily at all levels of education since 2015.
Of 119 grants active in fiscal year 2024, 87% included at least one activity related to gender equality.
In their partnership compacts, countries rated gender-responsive sector planning and monitoring as a high priority. Almost 90% of 46 partnership compacts include priority reforms informed by a gender analysis as well as recent gender data and evidence.
Partner countries included gender in sector analyses and used a gender lens to strengthen planning, monitoring and implementation of their plans and policies.
90% of partnership compacts include a priority reform that takes gender equality into account.
With GPE support, more trained teachers are in the classroom.
80% of teachers at the pre-primary level and 86% of teachers at the primary level met minimum qualification standards and partner countries are on track to achieve their 2025 targets.
More progress is needed to increase the share of qualified teachers at the secondary level.
GPE is taking steps to address data gaps.
The proportion of partner countries reporting data to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) declined over the past year. Partner countries value data availability and used and prioritized it in their partnership compact analyses. About half of the countries reporting progress on data last year were on track.
Actions taken by partner countries include strengthening education management information systems (EMIS), developing and implementing learning assessments, collecting sex-disaggregated data and enhancing data utilization for decision-making.
More than 50% of countries are on track to improve data and evidence.
GPE incentivizes actions to improve learning assessments.
Progress remains slow in learning outcomes, constrained by the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing economic challenges. In 28 partner countries with data, only about a quarter of children are achieving minimum learning levels in reading and mathematics at the end of primary education.
GPE's focus on learning assessment systems has strengthened under GPE 2025 and the priority reforms in all partnership compacts include measures to conduct learning assessments or to strengthen learning assessment systems.
GPE grants also directly incentivize improvements in learning assessment systems.
GPE implements a range of cross-national initiatives through KIX and Education Out Loud to strengthen learning assessments. This includes support for citizen-led assessments and peer-learning programs for ministry officials.
77 grants supported learning assessments in 65 partner countries in FY 2024.
GPE supports partner countries to prioritize financing for education and improve sector coordination.
The average education spend saw a slight increase for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The volume of domestic financing for education in partner countries improved slightly in 2023, with almost 60% of countries either maintaining it at or above 20% of total spending or increasing their education expenditure from 2020.
Partner countries gave high priority to addressing challenges in domestic financing. They changed policies to make the distribution of school grants, teachers or teaching and learning materials more equitable; carried out studies to analyze barriers to efficient expenditure; and improved financial management systems.
80% of partner countries were on track to improve sector coordination—an essential step toward more efficiency. They strengthened or established mechanisms for collaboration and strengthened budget and financial management processes for better coordination of domestic and externals financiers.
Almost all local education groups, which lead sector coordination, include civil society organizations and 64% include teachers' associations.
