11 October 2016 - Drawing on the skills gained from monitoring government budgets in over 70 countries, Government Spending Watch (GSW) helped develop a toolkit on Domestic Financing for Education produced by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) in collaboration with ActionAid International (AAI) and Education International (EI).

As the world embarks on the difficult task of putting into action the newly agreed SDG 4, and the accompanying Education 2030 Framework for Action (FFA), this toolkit aims to support CSOs and education activists across low- and middle-income countries to advocate and campaign on issues related to financing for education.The SDG 4 and the FFA contain collective commitments to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030 - which will require ambitious new financing commitments to meet this goal.

The toolkit, based on 4 modules, is adaptable to different contexts, and aims to be as broad-based in its scope as possible. The toolkit can be used in its entirety, but each module is also designed so that they can be used as a standalone product, depending on experience, knowledge, context or interest.

13 September 2016 - DFI was commissioned by UNESCO to provide a background paper and case studies which were used for the new Global Education Monitoring Report. This publication series provides independent monitoring and reporting of the Sustainable Development Goal on education (SDG 4) and on education in the other SDGs, for the next fifteen years.

The 2016 instalment entitled “Education for People and Planet: Creating Sustainable Futures for All” aims to bring insight for governments and policymakers to monitor and accelerate progress towards SDG 4.

On the basis of the data collected for the Government Spending Watch initiative it manages, DFI contributed a background paper on “Integrated financial planning and SDG readiness in the education sector” which helps build the evidence for how prepared for a more holistic and integrated approach to financial planning developing countries are, in light of the new SDG agenda. DFI also prepared two case studies focusing on SDG readiness in South Africa and Colombia.

Related information on the report is available here.  

26 January 2016 - DFI participated in a British Academy International Forum with the secretariat of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity (chaired by Gordon Brown). Based on its work for GSW, GCE and UNESCO, DFI presented its views for priorities in mobilizing financing for education during the SDG period, and will be continuing to work with the secretariat over the next few months, making inputs on spending patterns and debt issues.

28 October 2015 - The Global Campaign for Education (GCE) has published a new report which reveals a worrying failure in reaching education financing goals.

Taking stock of investment and aid levels in education since the goal-setting Dakar Education Forum fifteen years ago, Education Aid Watch 2015 checks delivery against promises made by donor countries and finds that they fall short of the pledged donor support for the Education For All and Millennium Development Goals.

In contrast, using GSW’s latest analysis of the budgets of 66 low-income and lower-middle-income countries, the report shows that more than half of aid recipient countries had increased the share of their budgets going to education since 2012.

Despite these positive advances in aid recipient countries and the continued commitments of some donors, the reports paints an overall picture of wholly inadequate support for the agreed goals and offers concrete recommendations to realise the post-2015 pledges.

September 2014 - This report was commissioned as a background paper for the 2015 Education for All Global Monitoring Report in order to assess the financial resources available towards meeting the EFA goals using Government Spending Watch data. At a critical juncture in defining the post-2015 education goals, this analysis was intended to help to provide insights which can improve financial commitments. Using GSW data sets, it presents a comprehensive and comparable dataset on public education spending across multiple countries (45 countries in total) and years (2011-13), and analyses trends which are highly relevant to the post-2015 goals. It looks, in turn, at the value of this dataset and challenges in its compilation; trends in budgeted education spending levels; trends in education spending as % of GDP and total government spending; shares of spending by different levels (primary, secondary etc); shares by different types of spending (wages, non-wage recurrent and capital); sources of funding (government and donors). It also compares planned and actual spending for different levels. It concludes with recommendations on the way forward. 

August 2015 - The final ever Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR) published to coincide with the end of the Education for All (EFA) agenda and the MDGs to evaluate progress since 2000, has used Government Spending Watch figures. These helped evaluate domestic spending trends in the education sector to feed into the EFA report.

DFI prepared a background report analyzing recent domestic resource spending trends in the education sector using our GSW database.This has enabled the GMR team to analyse spending trends in areas which they have not done previously, in particular recurrent and capital breakdowns, and the breakdown of salaries compared to other areas, as well as budgeted spend against actual spend.

GSW data was commissioned for this study as this is the only cross-country comparable data source which allows spending within the education sector (or other sectors) into these areas.  

This analysis is based on the latest trends analysis of GSW data in the GSW 2015 report

MDG target 2.A commits that, by 2015, children everywhere will complete a full course of primary schooling. In 2000, the Dakar Framework for Education For All (EFA) also set out six goals, and a broad commitment to ensuring quality education for all. Progress has been patchy. There have been huge strides in getting children into primary school; some improvements in youth literacy; a narrowing of gender gaps; and more children than ever completing basic education. But 58 million children are still missing out on primary school, expansion of access to primary education has been slowing, the global early school-primary leaving rate (25%) is the same as in 2000, and (due to insufficient focus on quality), many children end basic education without basic literacy and numeracy.

What does the latest GSW data on education show?

• Only 19% of countries are meeting the EFA target to spend 6% of GDP on education and 22% of countries are meeting EFA targets of 20% of total budget on education.
• Education is the best overall sector for trends on MDG spending as it has seen the most upwards movement (albeit against a miserable set of progress in other sectors and/or sector spending shrinking), and has the most countries meeting one or both of the international spending targets. So thee other (relatively) positive story is that average spending is 80% of the target and most countries are increasing spending.
• Education is closest to reaching its MDG targets, but the SDGs’ lifelong high-quality learning agenda will require US$161 billion more.

• To read more about the education sector findings in the GSW 2015 report here.
• To see what explains these trends, by understanding the financing behind them, including donor aid performance, click here.
• To see how accessible data are for this sector, click here.

The Global Campaign for Education's report, A Taxing Business: Financing Education For All Through Domestic Resources, identifies four major steps towards achieving increased domestic resources, primarily through improved taxation and revenue-generation from natural resources, and the vast impact this could make on ensuring quality, public education for all.  The report draws on a number of data-sets to explain the trends in domestic spending on education, including Government Spending Watch.

Read the report in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese

This report was commissioned as a background report for the 2010 UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010, analysing the impact of the global financial crisis on African government budgets and education spending for 2009. The paper concludes that some countries have been given more "fiscal space" in 2009 to spend more to counter the effects of the crisis, which has meant that only a few countries have cut education spending in 2009. However, much more spending could be financed with grants or loans, without jeopardising macroeconomic stability or debt sustainability, or creating excessive aid dependency.

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This study was commissioned by UNESCO as a background study for the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report 2011, to update analysis of the impact of the global financial crisis on education spending in IDA-only countries, using 2010 budgets. It finds that there will be a continuing fall in education spending in 2010 (though health spending will rise), while spending in non-programme countries will rise to offset a fall in 2009. Overall, current LIC education spending plans are likely to fall well short of the EFA goals, especially for "off track" countries. It also finds a great deal of potential "fiscal space" to expand spending during 2011-15 period to reach EFA goals, especially by absorbing extra aid or mobilizing more budget revenue.

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