The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set ambitious targets for high-quality, universal education by 2030. But existing efforts to “cost the SDGs” return unattainable price tags. In this chapter, we first review approaches to costing the SDGs in the education sector.

In 2021, Ghana announced a plan to issue sovereign bonds of up to $2 billion, with proceeds due partially to fund a free secondary school program. Just months later, Ghana’s rising debt burden means this is no longer feasible. Can developing countries tap the social bond market in order to fund publ...

Germany supports the universal basic education goals of the SDGs, wants to eradicate global poverty and promotes multilateralism as the way to achieve these goals. So why does it route most of its education aid to higher education? Why does most of its aid go to upper-middle-income countries and its...

Prolonged school closures during COVID-19 meant that over 7.7 million Malawian children were out of formal schooling for over seven months. There is little information about the impacts of school closures and the COVID-19 crisis on these individuals. What happened to student participation over the t...

A couple of years ago, we examined aid data from the OECD and UNESCO Institute for Statistics, analysing how much aid is going to education, where it is allocated, by who, and through what channels. Two years on, we provide an update to see what’s changed.

In an accompanying blog we argue that girls’ education is unlikely to reduce future emissions, and that we should not think of girls in low-income countries as ‘assets’ to solve a climate crisis. But there is a link between education and climate change—it’s just the other way around. Here are f...

You might think girls' education and climate change are quite different issues. But, with money for and political attention on climate change growing, savvy education donors and advocacy organisations are increasingly making links between the two. The UK’s FCDO, for instance, claims girls in poor co...

Each year over two million secondary-school students across Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia and The Gambia sit coordinated tests known as the WASSCE. In a new CGD working paper, undertaken by researchers from CGD and IEPA-Ghana, we look at English and maths papers in West Africa’s leading high...