Education is one of the few public investments that finances itself over time. A child who completes quality schooling earns more, pays more taxes, and contributes to the fiscal base that funds the next generation.

Yet in low-income countries, only $55 is spent per child each year — compared to nearly $9,000 in high-income countries. At that level of investment, education systems cannot generate the returns they are capable of. The conditions for self-sustaining investment have to be built — and that process requires the right financing at the right moment.

This is what sustainable financing for education is actually about. Not filling annual gaps but building the conditions under which countries can progressively finance their own systems — and where external support plays a catalytic role that is now even more essential.

The transition that has to be designed

The path toward greater financing self-reliance doesn't happen by reducing support and hoping systems hold. It happens by using financing — intentionally, strategically — to build the institutions, incentives, and fiscal foundations that make sustained domestic investment possible.

This means treating education as a whole-of-government priority from the outset.

In Liberia, volatility in external financing recently exposed the limits of a system without a domestic fiscal strategy to fall back on. Supported by GPE and partners, this triggered closer collaboration between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance — shifting from competing priorities to building a shared investment strategy anchored in realistic fiscal trajectories.

Guatemala illustrates a different starting point. Education already receives a significant budget share, but outcomes remain constrained within a limited fiscal envelope. With IMF and GPE support, ministries of education and finance are now working together to increase efficiency of spending so financing translates into relevant skills for the job market, increased productivity and eventually strengthens the fiscal case for sustained domestic investment.

Civil society also plays an important part. Through Education Out Loud, GPE supports organizations to engage in tax justice, budget transparency, and legislative processes — strengthening accountability across the budget cycle and helping ensure education remains a sustained fiscal priority.

Using external financing for what it does best

Not all financing plays the same role in this transition — and confusing those roles is costly for both efficiency and sustainability.

Some financing protects the foundations. In Somalia, GPE grant support maintains essential services while the government rebuilds fiscal capacity. Without this, disruptions would set back a transition that has barely begun. Stability here is is the prerequisite for everything that follows.

Some financing accelerates transformation. In Côte d'Ivoire, the Child Learning and Education Facility brought together the Jacobs Foundation, UBS Optimus Foundation, and private sector actors from the cocoa industry alongside GPE's Multiplier. Philanthropy absorbed early risk — financing design and initial implementation — which unlocked additional resources and allowed the model to scale. This is catalytic financing working as intended: instead of substituting for public investment, it made it go further and arrive sooner.

Used deliberately, these roles reinforce each other — and create the conditions to attract financing that would not otherwise reach public education systems: philanthropic capital willing to take early risk, private actors aligned around shared goals, concessional funding that stabilizes while others accelerate.

What makes financing sustainable

External resources build toward self-reliance only if they strengthen national systems — working through public financial management wherever possible wherever possible, and using temporary ring-fencing where systems are not yet ready to absorb resources fully.

The test is programmatic sustainability: whether recurrent costs can be managed, delivery maintained, and programs sustained within a country's own fiscal constraints once financing structures evolve. The goal is alignment over time, not purity from the outset.

In Malawi, strengthening alignment between external financing and national systems is a priority — and a work in progress. GPE’s Malawi Foundational Learning Program for Results, implemented by the World Bank, is contributing to this by channeling financing through national budget and public financial management systems and linking disbursements to results.

At the same time, the GPE Multiplier has brought together a coalition including the Roger Federer Foundation and other private actors around the same priority — foundational learning. The next step is to progressively link this philanthropic financing to country systems — turning diversification and alignment into a single, reinforcing trajectory.

Education unlocks infinite possibilities, transforming lives, communities and the world.

Discover the Case for Investment

Those earnings strengthen tax bases. Those tax bases, in turn, finance education. That is what multiplying the future actually means — and why this moment of investment matters.

For more information on GPE’s approach to sustainable financing, see the GPE policy paper.