Now more than ever, sound decisions about financing interventions are critical. The cost of not investing is enormous—each year, governments lose out on $ 1.1 trillion in foregone revenue for early school leavers and $ 3.3 trillion for children without basic skills. Although there is a clear need for greater investment in education, financing for education has been stagnant or has been declining and the financing gap for low- and lower-middle income countries to reach their national SDG 4 target by 2030, amounts to $97 billion per year. Humanitarian funding for education decreased 4% in 2023. The lack of attention to early childhood care and education (ECCE) is clear—children aged 14 and over in African Union countries receive 10 times more funding than 2-year-olds. Yet 43% of boys and girls under 5 years old in low and middle-income countries are at risk of not reaching their full development potential due to poverty, lack of caregiver attachment, early education opportunities, or appropriate access to basic quality services such as clean water and healthcare. Even with these alarming indicators, just 1.2% of the global education aid budget goes to early childhood education.

The dismantling of USAID has impacted funding for education and ECCE programs across developing countries, exacerbating the already insufficient funding, demonstrating the importance of the Global Costing Taskforce for Education and ECCE. Furthermore, the U.K. has announced aid reductions from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income starting 2027, redirecting funds to defence. The Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium are similarly reducing aid budgets, with the Netherlands cutting around 1 billion euros, Sweden $1 billion, and Belgium cutting its development aid by 25%. France is reducing its aid budget by 37%, and Switzerland has confirmed it will slash $15 million, cutting its contributions to United Nations development aid.

The education and ECCE community cannot waste time or resources on interventions that do not lead to improved developmental and educational outcomes. To make cost-effective decisions, cost data are critical. Cost data allow for accountability of spending, setting priorities, budgeting, and planning, managing program activities, and advocating for investment in any intervention. While cost-effectiveness analysis has received greater attention recently, being named as a requirement in improving development finance, cost data remain sparse and suffers from poor-quality. Without high-quality cost data, the likes of which can be provided by the Global Costing Taskforce for Education and ECCE, decisionmakers are uninformed when implementing, changing, reducing, or scaling programs. The importance of cost data draws on years of research by the Center for Universal Education (CUE) expanding on knowledge from the collection, analysis, and use of data, as well as outcomes-based financing in education and ECCE. At a time when 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are failing to meet minimum standards in foundational literacy and numeracy, and when 40% of children before primary-school-entry age need access to childcare, focusing on cost data in education and early childhood development is crucial. We cannot afford to fall further than we already have.

Read the full article about the Global Costing Taskforce for Education and ECCE by Emily Gustafsson-Wright, Ema Eguchi, and Elyse Paint at Brookings.