Global Action Week for Education (GAWE) is taking place this week and is focused on holding governments and international communities accountable for implementing the full SDG4 Agenda through “Keeping Your Promises”. Funding Education was bought to the forefront of the Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) Financing Conference in Dakar earlier this year; where leaders of developing and donor countries pledged to increase funding in Education. Governments are being asked to work towards funding public, equitable, inclusive and free education.
The Global Education Mentoring Report 2017 highlighted the following:
- Governments are accountable as they are the primary duty bearers of the right to Education.
- Governments can be held accountable through elections, but only 45% of elections were free between 2001 and 2011. Politicians have a tendency to focus on the tangible such as school infrastructure but not on issues such as teacher development.
- The media plays an important role in bringing the results from governments. For example in Uganda a decrease in a 2.2 km in distance to a newspaper outlet resulted increased funding for a school.
- Credible education plans should be created with clear targets for allocated resources and transparent budgets that can be tracked and queried.
- The government can be taken to court for violating the right to education in only 55% of countries. This has been only exercised in 41% of countries and has resulted in school meal provision in India.
- National Education Monitoring Reports are an essential in communicating how much progress has been made against set goals. These are produced in 108 countries out of 209 between 2010 and 2016. One in six countries does so annually.
- 42 out of 86 countries, constitutions, laws or policies specifically refer to inclusive education.
The facts and statistics above further contributes to the theme of GAWE 2018 that a continuous and focused push is needed to ensure that governments deliver the full SDG4 Agenda.
