Global Action Week for Education was held April 24 through 30 this year. UNESCO attended the Global Campaign for Education’s event to discuss what can be done to increase education funding, reported Education International.

According to UNESCO, the Global Campaign for Education is responsible for organizing this week devoted to global education and this year focused particularly on ways to create financial resources for global education.

GCE partnered with UNESCO at their headquarters in Paris on April 25 to hold a panel on this topic, entitled, “Financing for SDG4-Education 2030: Leaving no one behind — what will it take to narrow inequity gaps?”

The SDG4 refers to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Goal 4, which focuses on Quality Education, per the UN’s website.

SDG4 has a number of targets to aim for, according to the U.N. Women website. Some of these goals include, by 2030, to have:

• All girls and boys complete adequate primary and secondary education
• Gender equality at all levels of education
• All boys and girls and many adults achieve literacy and numeracy
• Relevant skills taught, including sustainable development.

According to UNESCO, many countries still struggle with meeting the basic education needs of children, due in part to either of lack of funding or misallocation of funding. This, in turn, is hard to remedy because there is not always adequate data regarding either the financial aspect of education or the number of school-age children being properly educated in a given country.

UNESCO is uniquely suited to aid in the effort to create more meaningful data on global education, via the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. UIS is working not only to create better data, but also to use that data to create better plans for itself and similar groups to create global education goals.

For the Global Action Week for Education, target goals included demanding that governments honor the financial commitments they have pledged in support of education, reported Education International.

Key speakers for the panel included H.E. Ambassador Tarald Brautaset, Norwegian Government’s Special Envoy for Education in charge of the Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, David Archer, Head of Programme Development with ActionAid, GCE Board Member and Teopista Birungi, founder of the Uganda National Teachers’ Union.

UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said this of the issue: “Failing to make adequate investments in education puts the fulfillment of the entire global agenda at risk.”

– Katherine Hamblen

Photo: Flickr