Over 40 Civil Society organizations call for G7 leadership at the GPE financing conference


January 10, 2018
by Milagros Lechleiter, Global Education Associate

Each year, the G7* Accountability Working Group (AWG) chooses a theme to monitor G7’s progress to its commitments and publishes a report. This year, the AWG under the Italian presidency of the G7, chose to take a close look at the G7’s progress towards the Heiligendamm commitment on education that included a pledge in support of the Global Partnership for Education.

The Taormina progress report- Investing in Education for Mutual Prosperity, Peace and Development identifies investments in education as a multiplier force to accelerate progress on a range of G7 priorities including global development and security and shows G7 countries’ priorities focusing more on holistic and outcome-oriented initiatives that present high return on investments in terms of lifting people out of poverty, stimulating resilience, and fostering peace.

Closing the education finance gap

Although the report notes progress in education around access to primary education between 2000 and 2015, it identifies the financing gap between needed and available resources for education as a challenge. The report emphasizes both domestic resources and G7 countries’ contributions as crucial to close the financing gap. For example, between 2004 and 2016, G7 countries made up 40% of the contributions to the GPE fund, G7 countries and European Union cumulative contribution to GPE totaled US$1.8 billion, and, G7 bilateral support for basic education in GPE developing country partners varied between $700 million and $1 billion annually over the past decade with a decrease between 2014 and 2015.

The GPE Financing Conference as an opportunity to fulfill the G7’s commitment to education

The report closes by pointing to the GPE replenishment as a crucial moment to ensure adequate funds are available to finance education and calls upon G7 countries to uphold the Heiligendamm commitment and contribute to fully fund GPE. Supportive of the Taormina Report conclusions, over 40 Civil Society organizations from G7 countries have gotten together to ask the G7 leadership to fully support the upcoming GPE replenishment. With less than 1 month until the financing conference in Dakar, a major increase in financial commitments are needed from all development partners to secure quality learning for all is available in the 89 GPE developing country partners that are home to 78 percent of the world’s out-of-school population.

* The G7 is an informal bloc of industrialized democracies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

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