Executive summary
Global aid cuts have severely impacted funding for education and early childhood care and education (ECCE). This underinvestment has serious consequences: It limits children’s development, reduces parents’ ability to work, and costs governments trillions in lost revenue due to early school leaving and poor foundational skills. To reverse these trends, governments and donors must prioritize effective, evidence-based spending, guided by high-quality cost data. However, such data remains sparse and unreliable, undermining efforts to plan, budget, and scale impactful interventions.
In April 2025, the Brookings Center for Universal Education (CUE) launched the Global Costing Taskforce for Education and ECCE with the aim to garner commitment and harmonize efforts across the sector and funders to increase the volume of available quality cost evidence. The Taskforce was born out of over a decade of work by CUE on the topic of cost data in education and early childhood sectors.
The Taskforce is led by CUE as the secretariat and is comprised of a Steering Group, a group of distinguished high-level representatives from government, donors, practitioners, and researchers across the sector, as well as a Consultative Group, a broader group comprised of individuals from across the globe representing on-the-ground experience from these same stakeholder groups. At the launch of the Taskforce, the Steering Group provided instrumental support in helping structure the format and governance of the Taskforce. The Steering Group and stakeholders in the global education and ECCE communities who were invited to join the Consultative Group all provided feedback on the proposed Taskforce plan.
Engagements with the Steering Group and the Consultative Group revealed a strong interest and consensus among participants on the need for coordination and cohesive action to improve cost data collection, analysis, and publication in education and ECCE. Both the Steering Group and Consultative Group members largely agreed with the identified challenges (limited availability, limited utility, and limited coordination) and flagged a fourth problem: limited demand. The discussions reflected the diverse experiences members brought from their work in the sector, helping to frame each challenge by actor type. The meetings also emphasized the importance of focusing on increasing the amount of high-quality, contextualized, usable cost data over just increasing quantity.
Building upon this foundation, the members found the proposed action plan well aligned with the identified challenges. Proposals for straightforward standards, sector-wide harmonization, and institutional commitments, especially from donors, to require and support cost data and analysis resonated strongly. The members’ expertise helped further refine the proposed activities and their sequencing. Capacity strengthening, transparency, and trust received emphasized importance among the group. Adapting to capacity limitations will help fit practitioners’ immediate needs, and the sector must also frame cost collection and analysis within political incentives and practical decisionmaking contexts.
Beginning in January 2026, the Taskforce, led by CUE, will take forward the proposed action plan through technical working groups that will tackle the main pillars of the plan. Over the next three years, the Taskforce aims to make significant progress in achieving its mission of increasing the availability of quality cost data in the education and ECCE sectors so that more children have access to the programs and services they need to thrive.
Authors
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Acknowledgements and disclosures
The Secretariat of the Global Costing Taskforce is deeply grateful for the time and commitment of the Steering Group for contributing invaluable insights into the development of the proposed action plan. In addition, we appreciate contributions from the members of the Consultative Group from across the globe who have provided input on the mission and problem statements as well as the proposed action plan. Finally, we are grateful to Tamar Manuelyan Atinc, Divya Lata, and Jennifer O’Dohoghue for their comments and suggestions and to the communications team at Brookings for copyediting, design, and publication support.
Brookings gratefully acknowledges the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the Hempel Foundation for their generous support of this work.
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