In order to achieve the Global Goal for quality education the world must commit to ensuring education has adequate financial investments. While external aid plays an important role in filling the education funding gap of $39 billion per year, domestic resources are the most important source of financing.

The Education Commission estimates that low- and middle-income countries must increase their spending on education from the current $1.2 trillion per year to $3 trillion by 2030 to meet the educational needs of children in pre-primary, primary, secondary, and post-secondary school.

GPE is committed to improving domestic financing and creates incentives for developing country partners to develop financially sustainable education sector plans, increase national budget allocations and improve the quality of education expenditure.

This commitment has yielded promising results. As the above graph shows, between 2002 and 2013 GPE partner developing countries increased expenditure on education as a percentage of total government expenditure from 15.2 percent to 16.6 percent. This increase of 1.46 percentage points is more than three times the average increase in all low-and middle-income countries (0.42 percentage points).

Furthermore, the increase in expenditure on education as a percentage of the gross domestic product in GPE partner countries where data is available (0.90 percentage points) was double the average increase in low- and middle-income countries (0.43 percentage points).

Find out more on GPE’s engagement on domestic financing for education in our new Policy Brief.