The civil society education fund (CSEF) was set up in 2009 to support civil society to campaign for the delivery of Education For All goals. It is coordinated by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), through regional agencies (ANCEFA, ASPBAE, CLADE, ACEA), which provide programmatic support to national coalitions. They also receive technical support from ActionAid Americas, Education International and Oxfam IBIS. 

GCE, over many years, has worked to ensure that citizen voices can help to shape education planning and delivery.

We know that a knowledgeable and active civil society that facilitates increased citizen participation is critical to ensuring effective development, implementation and monitoring of education plans and policies.

This can help to overcome some of the many barriers to realizing a quality education for all: lack of political will, weak policy frameworks, planning which does not respond to the realities of low-income families or does not reflect the needs of excluded or marginalized populations, poor resource mobilization, and misallocation – or misuse – of funds.  

Giving civil society a voice

The CSEF is rooted in this vision: a vision that sees civil society as having a crucial role to play in bringing together a wide range of voices and perspectives, including those not usually heard in policy-making: by promoting awareness of education rights, policies and realities, by mobilizing organizations and citizens to engage and challenge local governments when their rights are not delivered, and by representing their views in official policy spaces.

Sometimes this involves being a mouthpiece for the marginalized or the excluded, and publicly challenging government actions through citizen mobilization. At other times it requires bringing community evidence or robust data to policy discussions.

The success of the civil society education fund

At the end of last year, as the world closed the chapter on the global commitment to achieve the Education for All goals and the Millennium Development Goals, the second phase (2013-2015) of CSEF was completed.

An external evaluation and a GCE-led global analysis of the lessons learnt, successes and achievements of the second phase helped us to evaluate its success.

So how did we do? During the 2013-2015 period, the aim of the CSEF was to: “Contribute to the achievement of national education goals and Education for All by ensuring the effective participation of civil society organisations and citizens in education debates and sector planning and review.”

In order to achieve this aim, the CSEF worked toward four mutually-reinforcing objectives related to policy participation, civil society and citizen awareness and engagement, quality research and analysis and the building of knowledge and networks across countries and regions.

This was supported through knowledge sharing, strengthening technical capacity, and funding global and regional support networks.

The most important conclusion to draw from the second CSEF phase was that, it was an ambitious and yet successful program. As an independent evaluation of the CSEF stated:

“The CSEF program has demonstrated a considerable level of effectiveness in strengthening civil society participation”.

A core part of the CSEF model aims at building diverse coalitions that are able to speak on behalf of a coordinated civil society voice. While such a model is never easy, it has a powerful impact when it works.

Growth of representation was, therefore, one of the key indicators to measure our success in CSEF II. At the end of 2015, the program represented more than 4,500 civil society organizations from around the world.

In fact, the number of coalition members increased by 50% from the start of the program. Hundreds more – including a number of academic and research institutions, and all major international non-governmental organizations active in the education sector – have collaborated in some way, many providing in-kind technical support.

Representing diversity and the most marginalized

Of course, it’s not just about numbers, but about ensuring that each national coalition also represents a wide spectrum of voices. CSEF II aimed to ensure that girls and women, people living with a disability, and young people in particular, were represented.

At the end of the program, 98% of coalitions included member organizations representing women’s associations, organizations of people with disabilities, or youth assemblies.

Finally, to ensure representation of voices of the poorest and most marginalized, it is important that coalitions are connected to the communities in which they live. This means working with community- based organizations (CBOs). Especially in large and populous countries, this entails building sub-national coordination structures, such as district and state-level chapters. 

This is another success area for CSEF II, with the number of countries reporting they had sub-national chapters rising from under half to nearly two-thirds over the course of the program.

In Bangladesh, local representation makes a difference

Nowhere is this clearer than in one of the longest running national coalitions, CAMPE in Bangladesh, where working with the local level is the most effective. CAMPE has a strong national presence, with subgroups in thematic areas, and state-level CAMPE subchapters which help coordinate work right down to the local level.

They work with communities, helping to empower them to understand their rights and channel concerns all the way up to the education ministry. In total there are more than 1,000 organizations who together form CAMPE, with hundreds of CBOs working on the overall program, as well as paid up members of the coalitions.

The next major area of work that CSEF II aimed to support was enabling national coalitions to engage with official processes of education sector planning. Specifically, the program aimed to help coalitions to engage with the official GPE planning processes, which in most cases are coordinated through a local education group (LEG).

More than 86% of all coalitions with an active LEG were engaging in this process at the end of the program. Meanwhile another 80% also engaged in regional and/or global consultation processes on the new Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) or the Education 2030 agenda – helping to ensure not only local to national advocacy links, but also national to global.

The next phase of the CSEF

The new phase of the CSEF (CSEF III) started in early 2016, coinciding with the new world commitment to the ambitious sustainable development agenda. For education, this includes the pledge to 'ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030’.

This ambitious goal is going to take all actors in the education sector working as hard as they can to achieve it. The CSEF remains vigilant in our role as a partner in the Global Partnership for Education.

We are committed to continuing to be both a watchdog and a partner to ensure government accountability for delivery of that agenda, including through support from GPE for CSEF III (2016-18).

Our recent review of the first half of 2016 shows that the CSEF continues to be a growing movement reaching up to 62 national coalitions of education campaigners and activists, teachers’ unions and civil society organizations across low- and middle-income countries advocating successfully for the achievement of a quality education for all children and youth.