Later this month world, leaders will gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York to discuss how to fix education. Even without big money or binding treaties, delegates can advance important reforms with clear, concrete ideas for action. Here are five big questions we think they need to ans...

It’s precisely four years since Sierra Leone kicked off one of the most ambitious schooling expansions on record. Today, fee-free and ‘Radical Inclusion’ policies support marginalized groups, including pregnant girls and the poorest children, to participate in school. But could high stakes exams be ...

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...