Imagine the scenario in which a newly appointed education minister arrives at the ministry, with a modern approach and steadfast commitment to the spirit and reporting of the Sustainable Development Goal on education (SDG 4). Yet the momentum fades quickly, as the minister realizes that they are in many ways like an air traffic controller, who sees a deadly storm looming on the horizon of a major airport when suddenly 80% of their navigation instruments begin to malfunction. In many countries, education ministers simply don’t have the data to avoid or even mitigate a global learning crisis, which is engulfing more than half of all children of primary and lower secondary school age, according to estimates by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. In short, the optimum management of an education system is no less complex than managing a country’s air traffic control system.
Both the political agendas and monitoring frameworks of the SDGs and Education 2030 are extremely ambitious. They demand an unprecedented increase in the collection, processing and dissemination from and, most importantly, within countries. The main purpose of the SDG 4 monitoring framework is to guide countries towards a comprehensive education agenda while minimising the burden on them of monitoring these activities.
Knowing how much this monitoring will cost is therefore both important and complex but it can also serve to identify the funding needs and add a “reality” check on the resources involved. It can thus inform dialogue on how we, as a community, get organized to monitor SDG 4. But focusing only on costs is to know the price of things and not the value of anything. The paper thus also starts trying to estimate how much we would benefit from better monitoring. Thus, the paper sets out the case for investing in SDG 4 data in all dimensions and is designed to raise the profile of the needs for monitoring and to build the case for multi-year commitment.
The intended audience for the material in this document is countries (officials and civil society), the international community and potential investors in education data. Resource mobilisation and communication staff are likely to produce shorter/more focused versions to support specific
audiences and purposes. This longer document serves as reference.
