This toolkit has been produced by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) in collaboration with ActionAid International (AAI) and Education International (EI), and with funding from the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). It aims to support civil society organisations and education activists across low- and middle-income countries to advocate and campaign on issues related to financing for education, as a strategic focus area of the GCE movement. It is also a result of increasing interest in advocacy around domestic financing for education as identified through GCE’s Civil Society Education Fund (CSEF) programme (GCE website).

GCE, AAI and EI are launching this toolkit as the world embarks on the difficult task of putting into action the newly agreed Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), and the accompanying Education 2030 Framework for Action (FFA). The SDG 4 and the FFA contain collective commitments to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030. In recognition that enacting this expanded agenda will require more funds for education, the FFA sets out financing benchmarks that commit governments to spending at least 4-6% of GDP and 15-20% of total budgets on education, and it highlights domestic resourcing as the most important way of funding education. In addition, in order to address issues of quality and equity in education, the FFA recognises there is a need for greater efficiency, better targeted spending and increased accountability (UNESCO, 2015a).

Civil society can – and should – play a critical role in this, which requires the building of a powerful evidence base on which to conduct advocacy and put pressure on governments to deliver sufficient funding for education, primarily domestic, complemented by external support where necessary. It is hoped that this toolkit will help to build knowledge and capacity so that education advocates and activists across the developing world can more effectively hold their governments accountable.

Key resource

Education is a fundamental human right of every woman, man and child. In states’ efforts to meet their commitments to making the right to education a reality for all, most have made impressive progress in recent decades. With new laws and policies that remove fees in basic education, significant progress has been made in advancing free education. This has led to tens of millions of children enrolling for the first time and the number of out of school children and adolescents falling by almost half since 2000. Important steps have also been taken with regard to gender parity and states have made efforts to raise the quality of education through improved teacher policies and a growing emphasis on learning outcomes. 

Despite these efforts, breaches of the right to education persist worldwide, illustrated perhaps most starkly by the fact that 262 million primary and secondary-aged children and youth are still out of school. Girls, persons with disabilities, those from disadvantaged backgrounds or rural areas, indigenous persons, migrants and national minorities are among those who face the worst discrimination, affecting both their right to go to school and their rights within schools.

To respond to the challenges, the Right to Education Initiative (RTE) with UNESCO have developed this handbook to guide action on ensuring full compliance with the right to education. Its objective is not to present the right to education as an abstract, conceptual, or purely legal concept, but rather to be action-oriented. The handbook will also be an important reference for those working towards the achievement of SDG4, by offering guidance on how to leverage legal commitment to the right to education as a strategic way to achieve this goal. 

FRANCAIS

The purpose of these Guidelines and Toolkit is to describe the different operational tools developed to help education stakeholders systematically collect and analyse the efforts put in place to ensure the right to education. These efforts should be central to every educational planning or programming document. The resulting analysis should also bring to light different and challenging policy gaps in education. The final goal is to mobilize all information and analyses gathered to nurture a constructive dialogue among key national stakeholders and to strengthen the right to education at national and local levels.

These Guidelines and Toolkit were originally conceived to support States in the planning process; thus, they are mostly directed at educational planners, managers, and decision- makers at the national level. However, the tools are flexible enough to be utilized by other relevant entities or partners at the national level (independent human rights institutions, ombudspersons, non-governmental organizations, etc.) and sub-national level, or organizations (United Nations agencies, development partners, civil society, etc.).

These Methodological Guidelines and Toolkit can and should be used to complement the UNESCO (2021) Guidelines to Strengthen the Right to Education in National Frameworks. The latter covers the right to education comprehensively and provides tools to examine and analyse the compatibility of national education legal and policy frameworks with international right to education standard-setting instruments. These Methodological Guidelines and their tools provide a new, different approach: addressing the right to education within a State’s planning and programming documents while supporting educational stakeholders in understanding and analysing the compatibility of their planning (ESPs and TEPs) or programming documents with the international obligations and commitments synthesized by the Abidjan Principles.The Abidjan Principles are not legally binding. Yet they have been mobilized throughout this project as a tool to show planners, decision-makers, and other relevant stakeholders the essential elements to acknowledge when creating or reviewing an educational planning or programming document to fulfil the right to education.