Executive summary
Every investment in children represents a choice. It is a choice about who to prioritize, which programs to support, which reforms to pursue, and ultimately how limited resources can create the greatest possible developmental and educational opportunities. These choices have never been more important. Around the world, education and early childhood development (ECD) systems are striving to improve developmental and learning outcomes while responding to rapid technological change, demographic pressures, political and climate-related disruptions, and widening inequalities. Governments are expected to do more with constrained budgets, and donors increasingly seek evidence that investments deliver lasting value. Researchers continue to expand our understanding of what works, yet one fundamental question too often remains unanswered: What does it actually cost to achieve meaningful change in specific contexts for specific populations? Despite decades of global investments in education, we still, as a sector, lack a clear answer that decisionmakers can use.
Answering that question is no longer optional. Over the past two decades, the education and ECD sectors have made remarkable progress in measuring developmental and learning outcomes and evaluating program effectiveness. Far less progress has been made in understanding the resources required to produce those outcomes or in using cost evidence to guide policy and investment decisions. As a result, many decisions about financing programs, scaling up interventions, and reforming entire education systems continue to rely on incomplete information. Without understanding costs alongside educational outcomes, it is impossible to judge whether an intervention represents the best use of scarce resources or whether its success can realistically be sustained and expanded.
This guidance note has been developed to help close that gap. Produced through the Global Costing Taskforce for Education and Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) convened by the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, it presents a harmonized framework for generating, analyzing, reporting, disseminating, and using cost evidence across the global education sector.
Throughout this guidance, the term “education” is understood broadly to include early childhood development, care and education, primary and secondary education, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), higher education, youth development, nonformal learning, and education support services. Drawing on existing methodological literature together with an extensive international consultative process involving governments, donors, researchers, implementing organizations, and technical experts, the guidance seeks to strengthen the quality, comparability, transparency, and practical usefulness of cost evidence. Equally importantly, it establishes a shared vocabulary that enables stakeholders across institutions and countries to communicate using common concepts and methodological assumptions.
The central premise of this guidance is straightforward: cost data is an essential decisionmaking tool which stakeholders are currently not using effectively. Governments should use it to prioritize investments and assess fiscal sustainability. Donors should rely on it to compare funding opportunities and improve portfolio performance. Implementing organizations should use it to understand cost drivers, strengthen operational efficiency, and plan for long-term sustainability. Researchers who generate cost evidence to complement impact evaluations and improve understanding of what constitutes effective and efficient educational investments can do more in making cost evidence relevant and accessible to decisionmakers. Civil society organizations, communities and families should use cost evidence to promote transparency and accountability. Although these stakeholders ask different questions, they can all benefit from using reliable cost information to make better decisions. The guidance therefore argues that the sector must invest not only in producing more high-quality cost evidence, but equally in strengthening the institutional capacity to interpret, communicate, and routinely use that evidence throughout policy, planning, implementation, financing, and evaluation.
At the heart of the document is a practical cost measurement framework organized around the decisions that cost evidence is intended to inform. Rather than beginning with spreadsheets, budgets, or accounting systems, the framework starts by defining the decision objective. That objective determines the cost questions that need to be answered, which in turn guide the selection of analytical methods, determine the data that should be collected, and shape the resulting analysis. This logical sequence ensures that cost studies generate evidence that is directly relevant to real-world decisions rather than collecting information simply because it is available.
The framework is equally applicable to discrete education interventions and to broader system-level reforms—while recognizing that these require different levels of complexity and analytical precision. It also reflects an increasingly important reality: The global body of cost evidence continues to grow. Organizations should therefore begin by reviewing existing evidence before launching new costing studies, while recognizing the responsibility to generate and publish new evidence wherever important knowledge gaps remain. Building a cumulative, openly accessible evidence base is essential if future decisions are to become progressively better informed.
Building on this framework, the guidance proposes harmonized standards covering every stage of the cost measurement process. It provides practical recommendations for selecting appropriate costing methodologies, planning cost data collection, organizing and categorizing cost information, developing transparent data collection protocols, and selecting analytical approaches that match the intended use of the evidence. The guidance also addresses key methodological issues, including cost adjustments, analytical perspectives, shared costs, in-kind contributions, missing data, and sensitivity analysis, and summarizes reporting and publication standards designed to improve transparency, reproducibility, and comparability across studies. Finally, it outlines dissemination practices that help ensure cost evidence reaches the policymakers, practitioners, researchers, funders, and civil society who can use it to improve educational decisionmaking.
This guidance is intended to be more than a technical manual—it represents a collective commitment by the global education community to strengthen the role of cost evidence in improving educational policy and practice. Harmonized standards alone will not transform decisionmaking. Their value depends on widespread adoption, continued refinement, transparent reporting, and a shared commitment to building a cumulative body of comparable evidence. The work of the Global Costing Taskforce therefore does not end with this publication; rather, this guidance provides a common foundation upon which future methodological advances, institutional capacity, and international collaboration can continue to build. By embedding high-quality cost evidence alongside evidence of effectiveness, the global education and early childhood communities can make more informed investments, use scarce resources more wisely, and ultimately improve learning opportunities for children, young people, and adult learners around the world.
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