The launch of the Global Costing Task force for Education and ECCE

The need for more and better cost data in education and ECCE

Now more than ever, sound decisions about financing interventions are critical. The cost of not investing is enormous—each year, governments lose out on $ 1.1 trillion in foregone revenue for early school leavers and $ 3.3 trillion for children without basic skills. Although there is a clear need for greater investment in education, financing for education has been stagnant or has been declining and the financing gap for low- and lower-middle income countries to reach their national SDG 4 target by 2030, amounts to $97 billion per year. Humanitarian funding for education decreased 4% in 2023. The lack of attention to early childhood care and education (ECCE) is clear—children aged 14 and over in African Union countries receive 10 times more funding than 2-year-olds. Yet 43% of boys and girls under 5 years old in low and middle-income countries are at risk of not reaching their full development potential due to poverty, lack of caregiver attachment, early education opportunities, or appropriate access to basic quality services such as clean water and healthcare. Even with these alarming indicators, just 1.2% of the global education aid budget goes to early childhood education.

The dismantling of USAID has impacted funding for education and ECCE programs across developing countries, exacerbating the already insufficient funding. Furthermore, the U.K. has announced aid reductions from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income starting 2027, redirecting funds to defence. The Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium are similarly reducing aid budgets, with the Netherlands cutting around 1 billion euros, Sweden $1 billion, and Belgium cutting its development aid by 25%. France is reducing its aid budget by 37%, and Switzerland has confirmed it will slash $15 million, cutting its contributions to United Nations development aid.

The education and ECCE community cannot waste time or resources on interventions that do not lead to improved developmental and educational outcomes. To make cost-effective decisions, cost data are critical. Cost data allow for accountability of spending, setting priorities, budgeting, and planning, managing program activities, and advocating for investment in any intervention. While cost-effectiveness analysis has received greater attention recently, being named as a requirement in improving development finance, cost data remain sparse and suffers from poor-quality. Without high-quality cost data, decisionmakers are uninformed when implementing, changing, reducing, or scaling programs. The importance of cost data draws on years of research by the Center for Universal Education (CUE) expanding on knowledge from the collection, analysis, and use of data, as well as outcomes-based financing in education and ECCE. At a time when 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are failing to meet minimum standards in foundational literacy and numeracy, and when 40% of children before primary-school-entry age need access to childcare, focusing on cost data in education and early childhood development is crucial. We cannot afford to fall further than we already have.

What are the challenges with the current costing landscape?

1. Limited demand: Policymakers, donors, implementers, and researchers often don’t see cost data as critical to financial planning, budgeting, and priority setting.
2. Limited availability: Policymakers and implementers often lack adequate cost data, the capacity to analyze it, or fail to harness existing data systems for use in financial planning, budgeting, and priority setting.
3. Limited utility: Where data do exist, much of it is collected too late in the process, still lacks detail and relevance to context and needs, and is not comparable (even within country), reducing its utility for key decisionmakers and institutions.
4. Limited coordination: While momentum around the value of cost data has recently grown in the global education and ECCE sectors, uptake remains slow, there is a lack of harmonization in standards, definitions, and language and there is a considerable risk of duplication of global efforts towards the same goal.

These issues can lead to insufficient, inequitable, and suboptimal allocation and spending of resources for education and early childhood programming. With the goal of tackling these challenges, CUE hosted a workshop in London, U.K. in January 2024. The workshop initiated a discussion among key education funders and researchers in pursuit of a collaborative vision, shared methodology, and reduced duplication of efforts. Discussion provided an opportunity to explore the idea of the formation of a Global Costing Taskforce (GCT). Participants determined that a Taskforce, which aims to bring together representatives of all stakeholders and ensure a strong global majority presence, would be beneficial in understanding and improving the use of cost data in education. Without harmonization of methodology, research, and policy, the education community will not be able to effectively and urgently respond to the learning crisis the world faces today.

A Global Costing Taskforce for Education and ECCE

The Global Costing Taskforce for Education and ECCE aims to significantly contribute to increasing demand for, and growing the volume, quality, and use of cost data to influence policy decisions, program design and implementation and resource allocation by:

• Engaging influential institutions to commit to making costing a priority.
• Harmonizing costing requirements by funders.
• Creating a central repository of resources and tools.
• Centering the global majority voice on costing.
• Strengthening capacity to collect, analyze, and use cost data.
• Creating a shared lexicon on cost related terms.
• Amplifying potential synergies and eliminating duplication of efforts.

With the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education serving as the secretariat, in the first year, the GCT will consist of a Steering Group and a Consultative Group.

The Steering Group includes high-level representatives from UNICEF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, ECDAN, the Global Schools Forum, and Human Capital Africa as well as several representatives from ministries of education from South Asia, East Africa, West Africa, Southern Africa, and Latin America. This stakeholder group will provide expert insight to the GCT, specifically regarding the barriers and opportunities of costing, as well as provide oversight over the direction and effectiveness of the GCT. By helping to determine priorities, overseeing quality, and supporting implementation of a plan of action for the GCT, these key decisionmakers will help advance the agenda of more and better costing in education and ECCE.

The Consultative Group will consist of global, regional, and national partners and actors, both organizations and individuals, with interest and on-the-ground knowledge of barriers to more and better costing. This group will review proposed ideas, provide input on barriers related to cost data collection and analysis, share information and lessons learned in-country, and identify other concrete ways to advance the state of costing through the GCT.  

The activities that the GCT will pursue will be determined jointly through collective discussions by CUE and the Steering Group and informed by lessons learned from the Consultative Group.

How will it be different from past efforts?

Past contributions made by the education community have been integral in setting the stage for this taskforce, including various guidance documents such as BE2, reference cases, micro-costing, and macro-simulation tools. Costing tools such as CUE’s Childhood Cost Calculator (C3), which streamline the process of costing, and the accompanying Cost Data Explorer, which make cost data more widely and publicly available also helped inspire the taskforce’s work. The Taskforce will also build upon the work undertaken by the Global Education and ECD Costing Consortium, convened by CUE and the ECD Action Network (ECDAN), which also served as a peer learning and advisory resource to explore key technical and policy barriers in costing for education and early childhood sectors.

Yet, the Global Costing Taskforce will stand apart due to its specific focus on harmonizing efforts and having key decision-makers from donor and network organizations and from ministries in the room. Its activities will focus on the prioritization, standardization, applicability, and relevance of costing research globally, having a platform to share learnings among stakeholders. The GCT encourages institutions to explicitly make costing a priority, centralizing user-friendly platforms for costing resources, and strengthening capacity of costing for all stakeholders involved through trainings and a community of practice.

A commitment to the future

With the launch of the Global Costing Taskforce in April 2025, CUE kicked off discussions with the Steering Group and Consultative Group. After several rounds of conversations and iterations of the proposed plan, a final action plan will be created which narrows down priorities for the GCT and sets forth a timeline of for planned activities. The GCT will continue to convene through engaging in strategic communications and through sharing GCT recommendations with the global education and ECCE community.

The launch of the Global Costing Taskforce only indicates the beginning of work to harmonize efforts and garner commitment to costing for the future. The GCT is intended to be a sustained, solid movement with an ambition to build a strong network of “Global Costing Champions” countries which can serve as models for other countries in their costing efforts. Global majority voices will be at the center of the movement, ensuring that regular convenings around cost data and costing will be relevant to decision-makers where these interventions are the most needed. CUE hopes to see harmonization of costing on the rise, and a clear improvement in cost data collection and use in impact evaluation in the sector. Furthermore, implementers and governments will see improved linkages between costing and financing.

Overall, CUE’s launch of the Global Costing Taskforce is an explicit commitment: a sign that major institutions, key decision-makers, and global implementers will cooperate in ensuring that costing in education and ECCE interventions will be a core priority. It will mark the beginning of a new era where we have the tools and data for sufficient, effective, and equitable spending for education and early childhood care and education.

If you are interested in joining as part of the consultative process, please fill in this form to participate in one of our consultative group sessions. We can also be reached at [email protected] if you have any questions.