Taking stock, part 2: Mapping global education and early childhood costing and financing initiatives

An analysis conducted on how central costing and/or financing is to each initiative’s focus found that there is a wide range in how central these two topics are to the overall focus of each initiative. On the whole, financing initiatives tend to be more exclusively focused on financing. Four of the seven initiatives focus solely on financing in education, and it is likely that the upcoming Financing Observatory will also do the same. Costing initiatives run the gamut from those that focus solely on costing to those that include costing as a small aspect of their work, with minimal outputs. Many of the initiatives touch upon costing within the context of another topic. The hybrid initiatives tend to have the least focus on our topics of interest, with most including costing and financing as just one (or two) thematic area(s) among many within a broader mission.

Our experience working in both the costing and financing spaces generally aligns with these observations. While financing is a hot topic, especially in regard to the annual financing gap to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4, costing is not nearly as prevalent in discussion or even in evaluations and empirical studies of education programs. This is in part due to the many barriers to collecting and using high-quality cost data. Initiatives focusing on financing in education are robust and have, by and large, moved beyond making a case for themselves. On the other hand, costing initiatives are generally not standalone programs and often exist within larger initiatives, with some existing within an even larger organization. There is a pressing need to make well-informed decisions regarding which education initiatives are piloted, altered, scaled, or discontinued in under-resourced contexts, yet costing initiatives within the sector are not nearly as robust as those focusing on financing. The need to make well-informed decisions is perhaps even more true in ECD, which UNESCO finds suffers from “insufficient political, social, and financial commitment” at the “global, regional, national and sub-national levels” and which is poorly represented among the identified initiatives in our initial mapping.

Conclusion

This mapping project underscores the work being done by the sector in relation to financing and highlights the ongoing need for more substantial efforts to be made around costing and extending work to include ECD specifically. In addition, it brings to the forefront which players are involved, what links to government already exist, and what gaps persist. The work CUE does is one piece of the puzzle attempting to address the outsized goal of increasing the volume and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of education financing. Each of these initiatives represents another component of the puzzle, but there is still much work to be done. Both a lack of data and the capacity to use said data persist and continue to hold the sector back from making progress toward SDG 4. Gains will require collaboration, yet many of these initiatives are siloed or disconnected from others. In many cases, these initiatives exist as smaller components of a larger center or organization, and some may not have publicly accessible coverage of their mission and activities. This not only leads to missed opportunities to work in partnership to achieve our common goals but can also lead to duplication of efforts, wasting already constrained resources and time. To ensure the capture of initiatives that might have been missed in the research, readers are welcome to contribute information about initiatives (current, in the past five years, or coming in the next year) working on costing and/or financing in global education and ECD through this survey.