By Chinedu Anarado, Albert Nsengiyumva, Shem Bodo, and Oswald Rutayisire, ADEA On the 5th of May 2023, the World Health Organization declared an end to the COVID-19 Emergency. Nevertheless, global economic levers are still reeling from the effects of the pandemic. African economies are dealing with multiple shocks worsened by the war in Ukraine. These include weaker external demand, a sharp uptick in global inflation, higher borrowing costs and adverse weather events. Real output losses compared to pre-pandemic projections remain large, particularly in Africa. To address these issues, this blo ..read more

This blog was written by Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge, and Justin van Fleet, President of Theirworld. A new report shows that international aid for pre-primary education has fallen further behind spending agreed targets since the outbreak of Covid-19. It highlights “continued, chronic” underfunding of pre-primary education in many of the world’s poorest nations, with years of slow progress followed by pandemic-related cuts. Early childhood education is essential to children’s successful cognitive ..read more

By Alice Mukashyaka Advocacy Manager for Livelihoods and Education for Restless Development and Global Partnership for Education Young Leader  As the world reaches a critical point between the Transforming Education Summit and the SDG Summit scheduled to take place in September 2023, there is an urgent need for actions to break down the barriers that keep 244 million young people out of school. This blog announces a new partnership with Restless Development and the GEM Report. Together we aim to mobilize youth globally to inform the development of the 2023 Youth Report on technology and e ..read more

This blog post is based on the interventions of Dr Francesc Pedró, Director, UNESCO IESALC and Dr Axel Rivas, Director of the School of Education at the University of San Andrés and Academic Director of the Applied Education Research Centre San Andrés, Argentina, during the UNESCO IESALC webinar ChatGPT, inteligencia artificial y educación superior held on 17 April 2023. It also draws from UNESCO IESALC’s publication, ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education—Quick Start Guide.   Achieving 100 million users within two months of being launched in late 2022 and with aroun ..read more

By the GEM Report Even in low-income countries receiving a large amount in aid through grants, the main source of government revenue is taxation. Across 70 countries in 2018, taxes accounted for more than three-quarters of government revenue. If countries are to fill the finance gap for achieving their national SDG 4 education targets, which we calculated last week, tax revenue is going to have to increase. Countries differ greatly in how they raise tax and how much they raise. Looking across 100 countries in the 2021/2 GEM Report, we found that Chad, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Con ..read more

By Yuki Murakami, GEM Report Slow progress between 2015 and 2020, further challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, has put the world off track to achieve the global SDG 4 targets of universal pre-primary, primary and secondary education by 2030. Costing the achievement of these targets, as we attempted twice before in 2015 and 2020, is therefore no longer relevant, as these are unattainable by the original deadline. However, in the past two years, countries have established more realistic, if still ambitious, targets on selected SDG 4 indicators: the SDG 4 benchmarks. According to their benchmarks ..read more

We tend to take school calendars and timetables for granted – and we think they have no consequences – because they have been handed over to us from previous generations. Yet, from distribution of instruction days across weeks and years to duration and organization of the school day itself, they can have an important impact on the quality and equity of education systems. This blog explores the details. School years are organized in a variety of ways The organization of yearly school calendars is directly linked to total intended instruction time for students, often legislated by national or su ..read more

By Riche-Mike Wellington, Officer in charge of Legal and Administration, Ghana Commission for UNESCO In sub-Saharan Africa, over one in five students studying in higher education is in a private institution, rising to one in two in Ghana. With different actors providing higher education, the government needs to make sure it maintains oversight of the overall system to ensure quality and equitable access. Ghana, for instance, as our country profile on the PEER website shows, has a Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) under the Ministry of Education, which is committed to ensuring its higher edu ..read more

By Luis Crouch, RTI International, and Jan van Ravens, independent policy advisor Worldwide, only three out of five children had access to pre-primary education in 2020. In low-income countries, only one out of five was enrolled. The adoption of SDG target 4.2 does not seem to have accelerated the expansion of pre-primary education. In fact, the year 2015 seems to mark the beginning of a slowdown. Pre-primary education gross enrolment ratio by country income group, 1970–2020 Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics Data Low-income countries, in particular, suffer from the weak foundations synd ..read more

As we commemorate another International Women’s Day, girls’ education continues being seen as a threat in some parts of the world. The plight of Afghan girls and women is one concrete example of this, whose education has been erased entirely under Taliban rule, just as it was the last time they were in power. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, presented a report at the start of February to the Human Rights Council in Geneva that said the Taliban’s ban on female education “may amount to gender persecution, a crime against huma ..read more