Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1697630858264.pdf (Australia)
Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Secretariat www.globalpartnership.org Australian Senate – Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Submission to Inquiry into the UN Sustainable Development Goals I.
Introduction The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Secretariat’s written submission to the Australian Senate Inquiry on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will focus specifically on the question: “Which of the SDGs is Australia best suited to achieving through our ODA program, and should Australia’s ODA be consolidated to focus on achieving core SDGs,” with specific reference to GPE’s work and relevance to the region, and examples of best-practice.
SDG 4 (on education) and SDG 17 (on partnerships for the SDGs) are central for achieving impact across the global goals and Australia would benefit from maintaining these as priorities for Australian ODA.

GPE is one of the key tools Australia uses multilaterally to drive results in these areas.

II.

About the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) The Global Partnership for Education is a global multi-stakeholder partnership and fund for education.
It is the only fund which focuses solely on ensuring equitable, quality education for all through an inclusive systems-strengthening and results-based approach.

GPE mobilizes global funding, knowledge and political will; and acts locally, locking together better planning, more financing and mutual accountability to build strong education systems and better schools.
This in turn leads to better education outcomes, more children in school and greater equity and eventually to the world we want of less poverty, greater security, more productivity, empowered citizens and healthier people.

Under the 2018-2020 replenishment period 89 countries are eligible for GPE support, with 35 percent in the Indo-Pacific region.
Overall, as of December 2017, Indo-Pacific countries benefited from around US$1.5 billion of cumulative grant allocations and US$1.3 billion of cumulative grant disbursements, or around 35 percent of GPE funding.

This funding supported 18.5 million children, including 5.8 million children in the Indo-Pacific during the 2015-2017 replenishment period.
GPE recently held its third replenishment financing conference in Senegal, where it raised US$2.3 billion from donor governments to support education and US$110 billion from developing country governments for national education budgets over the period 2018-2020.

In Dakar, Australia pledged AU$90 million to the GPE Fund for 2018-2020 following a deliberate process and multilateral performance review conducted by DFAT in 2017.
The Australian contribution represents around 3 percent of the total amount of funding pledged to GPE for the replenishment period.

Australia has been a key partner government with GPE since 2008, including as a member of the GPE Board of Directors.

Australia’s 2015-2020 education strategy highlights investment in the Global Partnership for Education, noting the importance of GPE supporting children in countries affected by fragility and conflict.
1 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)Submission 41 GPE 2020 is a five-year strategic plan for the Global Partnership for Education covering 2016 to 2020 and has three main targets: improving learning, increasing equity, inclusion and gender equality; and building effective and efficient education systems.

GPE 2020 aligns its vision and mission to the Global Goals for Sustainable Development.
In doing so, it specifically recognizes that education is pivotal to the achievement of all the other Global Goals.

GPE’s mission responds to the international community’s call to GPE (in the Education 2030 Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development) to play a strengthened role in the achievement of SDG4.

III.
III.

The importance of Australian engagement in the Sustainable Development Goal Agenda Australian engagement in global, regional and national dialogue, implementation and monitoring of the SDGs is critical for the successful achievement of the goals and objectives outlined in the agenda.

A key difference between the SDGs and the previous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is that the 2015-2030 goals and objectives are common to all countries and can be universally applied.
The SDGs can thus operate as a tool to enable Australia to build on its strengths, including in the education sector, and showcase its domestic expertise and experiences from which other countries can learn.

For example, Australia scored among the top 9 economies in the recent Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Educating for the Future Index, which measures policy environments, curriculum and assessment systems and support for the teaching profession.
As the acquisition of 21st Century Skills becomes more and more important for a globalized economy, Australia’s solid performance could provide lessons learned for countries interested in strengthening their own education systems.

Additionally, the ongoing economic, cultural and security challenges we face as a global community are shared ones, and it is thus within Australia’s strategic interest to actively engage with the SDG agenda through its Official Development Assistance (ODA) program.
These challenges- including record people movement, continuing global and regional poverty, the threat of conflict and instability, climate change and the importance of solid economic and skills development in a rapidly changing and technologically-driven world-do not obey national borders but have the potential to have far-reaching implications if not addressed.
The SDG agenda provides an important blueprint for governments to begin to untangle these challenges, and investment through Australia’s ODA program can reap positive returns to Australia and Australians.

Australia also impacts the SDG agenda through its engagement with the Global Partnership for Education.
By investing in GPE, Australia has been able to use this broad multi-stakeholder partnership to drive results, including leveraging increased domestic financing for education, and to extend the geographic reach of Australian aid in low- and lower middle-income countries where it does not have bilateral programs.

It also allows Australia to increase the impact of its aid by working together across the full range of partners at the country and global levels to strengthen education systems.
Recognized as a model of aid effectiveness, GPE contributes to more effective Australian bilateral interventions through both strengthened systems and increased coordination and alignment of external education funding at the country level.

IV.
IV.

SDG4: Education as a foundation for achievement of all SDGs A lesson learned from the MDG era is that each global challenge and therefore each of the thematic Sustainable Development Goals are necessarily interlinked, and success for one goal cannot be complete without investment in others.
Health, gender and education for example, are important 2 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)Submission 41 cross-cutting issues; every dollar spent on an additional year of schooling for girls in low-income countries results in an estimated US$10 in increased earnings and health benefits.
An investment in education pays extraordinary dividends that are foundational for successful achievement across the SDG’s: education reduces poverty and boosts economic prosperity, empowers women and girls, improves peace and security, strengthen public health and food security, and leads to better stewardship of the environment.

Education is thus not only a stand-alone goal, but is central to the realization of all 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals.
SDG 4, with its 10 targets, represents a level of ambition for the next 15 years that goes beyond any previous global education agreement.

The elements of the education goal – access to basic skills, equity and lifelong learning – are key drivers for achieving social, economic and environmental goals.

The paragraphs below highlight only a few of the ways in which education is linked to other global challenges.
Boosting Economic Prosperity and Reducing Poverty Education is the foundation for economic prosperity, for individuals and for countries.

If every child in low-income countries completed secondary school by 2030, income per capita would increase by 75 percent by 2050 and poverty elimination would be brought forward by 10 years.
Investment in education moreover yields high returns; each dollar invested in education produces more than US$5 in additional gross earnings in low-income countries and US$2.50 in lower middle-income countries.

Investment in skills development through education, including in developing countries is also critical.

The global community is experiencing rapid transformation of economies as well as the jobs market.
Technological advances and automation could make half of today’s jobs obsolete by 2030, disproportionately affecting young people without advanced skills in developing countries.

Only 67 percent of children in low income countries are completing primary school and 274 million primary school children worldwide are not learning basic foundational skills necessary to lead productive and healthy lives.
This demonstrates the importance of ensuring opportunities for young people to develop a skilled workforce in order to build economies, increase the potential for proactive engagement in trade and reduce opportunities for conflict and instability.
In addition to strengthening education systems, GPE directly supports skills and livelihoods through grants in thirteen of its partner countries, including entrepreneurial education in Ethiopia, training and apprenticeship in Nepal, and tackling skills shortages in Zambia through vocational schools.

GPE recognizes that flexible, innovative students today will be a successful workforce in the future and investment in the strength of the education system overall will reap dividends for economic development.
Empowering Women and Girls Achieving women’s economic empowerment begins with providing quality education to girls.

We know that women represent nearly two thirds of the world’s illiterate, and lack of access to education is a major driver of gender gaps in labor-force participation.

Educating girls saves lives and delivers better economic opportunities.
Educated women are more empowered and have a voice in their life choices, including who they will marry, whether to have children and ending harmful practices like female genital mutilation.

Access to secondary education helps reduce child marriage by 64 percent in sub- Saharan Africa and South and West Asia.
Education 3 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)Submission 41 also improves the chance for girls and women to decide when they want to start a family and to decide how many children to have.

Australia and GPE share the position that gender equality in and through education is critical to the achievement of the SDGs.

As part of its core business, GPE works to help partner countries tackle gender equality gaps in their education programs, including through gender-sensitive education planning.
GPE has adopted a Gender Equality Policy and Strategy 2016-2020, which includes a focus on increasing equality in access, participation and learning achievement; strengthen gender equality in education sector legal frameworks and policy and planning processes.

From 2002 to 2014, the number of out-of-school girls in GPE partner countries fell by 9.3 million and gender parity has increased in both primary and lower secondary completion rates since 2002.
CASE STUDY: Afghanistan-Girls’ Education through Community-Based Education Afghanistan has made remarkable progress since 2001.

At that time, the number of children able to access education was low, especially for girls.

Now that number is up to 9 million, of whom 39 percent are girls.

Its latest sector plan takes a detailed look at gender disparities and the barriers that drive them, and sets a number of concrete goals for advancing gender equality in education.
Afghanistan also received a grant of US$55.7 million from GPE for the 2012-2016 period, which has taken a two-pronged approach: education system strengthening across the board that benefits everyone, and targeted efforts specifically focused on the country’s most salient needs regarding gender equality.
Programs funded by the current GPE program include hiring more female teachers in rural areas as well as increasing the visibility of women in administrative positions in the education system, and engaging religious and cultural leaders as well as families to promote girls’ education.
GPE’s involvement in community-based education in Afghanistan is an example of a systems- strengthening approach that does not target gender equality specifically but is nevertheless a powerful avenue for countering the disadvantage of girls in the country.

Community-based schools remove many of the top barriers keeping girls out of school in the country, including parents’ worries for their daughters’ safety during long walks to school in insecure areas.
As a result, they tend to have much higher ratios of girls enrolled—often over half.

But these schools are currently funded predominantly by external donors on a project basis.

GPE is helping to facilitate the kind of cross-regional alignment, equity and coordination that will ensure the sustainability and readiness of community-based education for incorporation into the government’s sector plan and budget.
Strengthened Health Outcomes Educated youth and adults are more likely to be healthy, to make healthier choices for their families and to seek health care when needed.

Indeed, achieving long-term results in the health sector requires a population to be educated and likewise, children and adolescents struggle to attend school and to learn if they suffer from poor health and inadequate nutrition.
A new GPE-supported report released in cooperation with the Disease Control Priorities and the World Bank presents evidence on the synergies that exist between investments in education and health, confirming the importance of both to the achievement of results across the Sustainable Development 4 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)Submission 41 Goals.
School health interventions, including for vaccinations, vision screening, insecticide-treated mosquito net promotion, deworming and school meals are among the recommendations to improve children’s participation and learning in schools.

Additional research has shown that that the best way to achieve impact in certain health outcomes is to invest in girls’ education.
Educated girls and young women are usually healthier than girls who did not go to school—and they have healthier children, who are likely to live past the age of 5.

Over the past four decades, the global increase in women’s education has prevented more than 4 million child deaths.

GPE is additionally supporting school-health programs through its core work in the region.
For example, in Cambodia with a GPE grant of US$38.5 million the government has formulated a plan for Children with Disabilities and has implemented a vision and hearing screening program to ensure they can continue to stay in school and learn.

This has been an effective example of cross-sectoral collaborations and one which can be scaled out to other contexts.
Improving Stability, Peace and Security The world is facing one of the greatest humanitarian challenges ever, reflected in the record highest consolidated humanitarian appeal of US$ 22.2 billion for 2017.

GPE is acutely aware of these challenges, with 63 percent of the world’s refugees currently in GPE partner countries.
These new challenges are creating instability around the world, with civil strife, climatic upheaval and economic instability creating greater numbers of migrants, refugees and internally displaced people.

Moreover, natural disasters, climate events and other factors are also affecting vulnerable populations, leading to increased displacement and migration.

Despite these challenges, the role of education is becoming more and more recognized as a critical intervention to improve security and build peace.
The chance of youth engaging in violent conflict declines by 20 percent for every additional year of schooling, for example.

Education provides the social fabric to prevent conflict, the social safety net to restore normalcy to communities, and the knowledge and skills to enable vulnerable groups to access opportunities for safe, productive livelihoods once crises have passed.
Schools and safe learning spaces can play a direct role in humanitarian response by promoting essential services, including protection, nutrition, water and sanitation and health services.

School and friendly learning environments can also be instrumental to protect women and girls from exploitation, trafficking and gender-based violence and provide them with life skills despite living through humanitarian crises.
GPE adopts a specific approach for countries experiencing fragility or conflict, with rapid deployment of financing through an accelerated funding window and flexibility for sector planning.
Additionally, GPE has provided a foundation for coordination and dialogue among development and humanitarian actors about the best way to utilize resources in crisis settings, such as shifting them to non- governmental providers for direct service provision during acute crises and integrating refugee education into national sector planning processes.
Most recently, in Bangladesh the GPE Secretariat has coordinated with the Ministry of Education and other local and international development partners to address the refugee crisis in Cox’s Bazaar.

In December 2017 the Bangladesh Ministry of Finance decided to allocate US$8.33 million of its US$100 million grant to directly support informal education for Rohingya refugee children.
5 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)Submission 41 CASE STUDY: Yemen - Continuing education against all odds Yemen, a GPE partner since 2003, has received over US$120 million in funding from the partnership.

GPE supported the country’s most recent transitional education plan, or “TEP,” for 2013–2015.

The support contributed to increased access to primary schools, especially for girls.
Yemen has made great strides in improving girls' enrolment in basic education over the past decade, from 52 percent in 1999 to 92 percent in 2013.

However, the country still has work to do to achieve equitable access to education for girls.

In 2015, escalating conflict led to considerable disruption of education in Yemen.
An emergency meeting of the local education group was convened by the Ministry of Education to determine how best to use GPE funds to respond to the conflict that left 1.8 million children out of school.
Using the GPE Operational Framework for Effective Support in Fragile and Conflict-affected States, approximately US$10 million (of a US$72.6 million grant) were subsequently redirected for rebuilding 150 schools, provide psycho-social support to 37,500 girls and boys, and basic school supplies for nearly 91,000 children.

More recently, during the meeting of the local education group in Amman, Jordan, Yemeni partners supported the TEP to ensure the continuation of education activities in the country.
The local education group in Yemen helped partners who have suspended their operations in the country to be involved in the sector dialogue and so enabled them to remain engaged during the crisis.

V. SDG17: Sustainable Development through Partnerships Sustainable Development Goal 17 calls for building and strengthening inclusive partnerships to drive the implementation of the sustainable development agenda.
To enable successful achievement of the whole SDG agenda, it is crucial to develop more inclusive multi-stakeholder partnerships that help to leverage resources and align efforts toward the common and universal global goals.

Within the education sector, GPE has helped to put in place the building blocks for government-led multi-stakeholder National Education Groups to work together to help improve public education.
At the heart of this partnership model is the development of a common plan of action for the sector behind which all efforts-both domestic and external are aligned.

GPE particularly supports the use of national systems and aligned aid modalities-critical for building capacity within national government structures for implementation of the sector plan.
Equally critical are a shared commitment to transparent monitoring, and reinforcement of the planning-implementation-monitoring cycle by using evidence and results to inform future planning and implementation.

For example, GPE has provided targeted support for education sector analysis and development in the Pacific, specifically in Kiribati, Vanuatu, Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshal Islands.
GPE is also supporting positive steps towards better coordination and rationalization of Pacific regional cooperation and initiatives in the education sector.

Coordination and alignment, accountability and focus on results are core principles that help in- country stakeholders work together toward the common goal of ensuring that every child has access to a good quality education.
SDG17 includes targets which focus on increasing and leveraging financing (from both domestic and external sources), support capacity building, enhance multi-stakeholder partnerships and invest in data, monitoring and accountability.
GPE’s model reinforces each of these elements, at both national level through its targeted support to Local/National Education Groups and 6 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)Submission 41 sector planning, and at global level through its governance structure, advocacy efforts and support for data strengthening and mutual accountability.
GPE’s Civil Society Education Fund Additionally, GPE’s Civil Society Education Fund (CSEF) and new fund for Advocacy and Social Accountability (or ASA, replacing CSEF and to be launched in early 2019), support strong regional and national civil society coalitions in education, including in the Indo-Pacific Region.
CSEF and soon ASA expand support for civic engagement and community mobilization for education, to build the capacity of citizens to reach out to their governments to demand change and work together to achieve it.

This provides a further mechanism for supporting SDG17.

To illustrate this example, in Cambodia the GPE CSEF-supported national civil society coalition (NEP) produced a public expenditure tracking survey which found that on average only 65% of allocated education budgets were reaching schools.
On the basis of this, and through consultations with schools and local officials, the coalition successfully advocated for school payments and teacher salaries to be disbursed through the banking system.

Also with support from CSEF, in Vanuatu the national civil society Education Policy Advocacy Coalition advocated for free education until grade 10 as well as for the recognition of kindergarten teachers.
Following national elections, these demands were adopted as policy by one of the political parties forming the coalition government.

VI.

Summary/Recommendations In this current global climate of scarce aid dollars, finding and creating greater efficiencies and leveraging the power of collaborative partnerships for development is a positive endeavour.
The GPE Secretariat fully supports the inquiry conducted by the Australian Senate into the SDGs, to help ensure each Australian dollar can leverage the widest impact.

We therefore appreciate the opportunity to provide input into the Inquiry and based on our analysis above, conclude this submission with the following recommendations: 1.

Prioritize education as a foundation for the achievement of other SDGs, and support cross- sector collaborations and multi-stakeholder partnerships where possible.

2.
2.

Support country-level coordination and national mechanisms whenever possible, including alignment to pooled-funding modalities where these are in place.

3.

Support efforts of civil society to engage in social accountability measures.

4.

Invest in multilateral partnerships to leverage the greatest impact in achieving the SDGs, including in GPE as a key tool for Australia to drive results in education.

7 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)Submission 41