Education

Education is fundamental to all human and economic development -- individuals, communities, and nations cannot grow without it. Its cross-cutting influence on health, gender equality, and income generation is especially critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, yet funding for education is inadequate, and donor funding has been stagnating.

SEEK's work in education has focused on analyses that make the case for greater investment in education both globally and domestically. We evaluate education's return on investment, appraise programmatic strategies, create donor engagement strategies, conduct financial analysis on both global and domestic financing, and work on the institutional architecture around education.
  
Clients have included the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, Oxfam Germany, Norad, Plan International, Bread for the World, and the Global Partnership for Education. 

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The Education Commission

The International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity was established in September 2015. The Commission is led by the UN Special Envoy for Education Gordon Brown and comprises 26 world leaders from diverse sectors and geographies.  

Working closely with the Secretariat of the Commission, SEEK’s assignment involved identifying opportunities for improving the global education architecture through a financial analysis using a participatory approach. This included consultations and focus group discussions with education experts and key stakeholders. This work fed into recommendations for changes to the global architecture and ways to mobilize additional financing for education from international and domestic resources.

A second workstream focused on building the investment case for education by modelling the returns on education investments from a health perspective, while also taking into account the returns on income. One key outcome of this work was a cost-benefit ratio that showed the significant returns of each dollar invested in education, and that drove the overall narrative of the Commission’s report, launched at the 2016 United Nations General Assembly.

The results of our work were presented to the Commission at its second meeting at the World Bank in April 2016, and to the Commission’s Health Panel at the Women Deliver Conference in June 2016, chaired by the Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.