At Financing the Future: Education 2030, held on the sidelines of the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly, leaders called for supporting GPE and its replenishment target (US$2 billion by 2020) and establishing an International Finance Facility for Education for longer-term financing, including Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg; President of France, Emmanuel Macron; and the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown.
As Chair of GPE, the only global fund solely dedicated to education in developing countries, Julia Gillard emphasized the benefits of investing in education, stressing that improved education outcomes, particularly for girls and women, will boost economic prosperity and promote peace and security. This event took place on the heels of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) report on progress towards SDG target 4.1 that found that 387 million primary age children and 230 million adolescents around the world are not achieving minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics. The largest number of these children live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly nine out of ten children between the ages of 6 and 14 will not meet minimum reading and math proficiency levels.