This international initiative could guarantee universal education within a generation.
Former United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown is proposing an international finance facility to support the closure of the global education funding gap.
Millions of children are absent from school due to child labor, marriage and trafficking, as well as discrimination against girls.
The initiative aims to address this issue by providing access to and increase the quality of education in low and middle-income countries.
It is hoped that the facility will generate $10 billion for education investments through guarantees from donor countries, leveraged by development banks. Guarantees help protect investors from the risk of non-payment, enabling development banks such as the World Bank to utilise more resources. This can subsequently lead to more affordable financing packages for developing countries.
"By using the money more effectively, we can achieve much more," Brown said.
Prerequisites for the countries’ access to the facility's resources and further increasing education aid include an increase in their education outcomes to match the top 25 percent best performing countries. An increase in each of the country’s own education investments to 5.8 percent of their national income is also necessary.
The funding programme is expected to be similar to that of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation. The latter transformed government pledges into funding for the vaccinations of millions of people.
Reference: http://www.globalissues.org/news/2017/04/20/23088
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