Giving Compass' Take:

• Bill Gates is calling out for higher quality global education initiatives that will be investments in human capital and potentially address broader poverty concerns. 

•Why does Bill Gates consider investments in global education to be investments in human capital? 

• Read more about how to improve access to education around the world. 

Bill Gates is rallying behind school quality in developing nations with a push for more assessment data, a new initiative that links the Microsoft co-founder's signature U.S. education priorities with his more prominent global philanthropy work.

"The world, in education, focused a lot on access, which is super important, and in most countries made huge progress on gender-equal access, but now there needs to be a focus on quality," Gates said in a press call on September 11.

This year marks new intertwining priorities for Gates' domestic and international work as it focuses on global education quality while also broadening its U.S. agenda to look at overarching poverty issues.

In June, Gates announced a new initiative that would focus on "global education learning," committing $68 million over the next four years to help improve primary and secondary education in India and African countries. And in May, the foundation also committed to delving deeper into systemic poverty in the U.S. by looking at both defined and abstract challenges such as racism and housing.

The foundation said the U.S. and global education work are both rooted in their belief that a quality education can best uplift those in poverty, though its two programs will operate separately because the challenges and solutions are different.

Gates said last year that the first step to measuring education quality will be to develop better "cross-national assessments," particularly for math and reading among younger students. Its new report cites UNESCO's estimates that over 600 million students are not minimally proficient, lamenting that few countries collect enough data points that would identify where their "learning crisis" lies.

Read the full article about global education by Sally Ho at Business Insider.