Join us for this lecture with David Archer from ActionAid International.

Join us for this Sussex Development Lecture with David Archer from ActionAid International to explore why and how transforming the financing of international education is critical to achieving quality education for all.

The Sustainable Development Goal on education (SDG 4) aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all, but the impacts of Covid-19, along with conflicts around the world, mean that goal is far from being achieved. Cuts to funding for development, from the US and many European countries have also left a big question about how to finance international education.

The highest-level education meeting ever to take place with Heads of State in New York at the UN Transforming Education Summit (TES) in September 2022. The finance agenda that emerged from that Summit was a radical departure from business as usual.

Previous international meetings on education focused on how aid and concessional loans can support education in lower income countries but these only constitute less than 3 percent of the global financing of education. The TES instead prioritised national and international action to transform the domestic financing of education and called for strategic engagement with tax policies, debt justice, and ending austerity.

This bold agenda is now supposed to guide the international community focused on the Sustainable Development Goal on education (SDG4) – and the latest research shows that action on debt, tax, and austerity will be critical to transforming the financing of education. But in the past four years the World Bank, multilateral aid initiatives and bilateral donors to education have consistently undermined this, defaulting to their comfort zone of focusing on aid and loans.

Speaker

David Archer is Head of Programmes in the Global Secretariat of ActionAid. He co-founded the Global Campaign for Education and the Right to Education Initiative, chaired the Strategy and Impact Committee of the Global Partnership for Education and was the stakeholder convenor of the finance track for the Transforming Education Summit.

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