Global Partnership for Education: A Comprehensive Overview

The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) stands as the largest global fund uniquely dedicated to transforming education in lower-income countries through a multi-stakeholder partnership. Transforming education is about creating impact at scale so that every child receives a quality education. It aims to create a systemic change and align resources to deliver education for the most marginalized children, raise learning levels, withstand shocks, and adapt to new challenges. GPE convenes partners around policy dialogue to determine how to best support each country collectively, based on agreed national priorities.

The Need for Global Education Initiatives

With over 270 million children out of school, the potential of an entire generation is at risk. Education and skills are key to jobs, prosperity, and empowering individuals and communities. Global initiatives like GPE are crucial in addressing this challenge and ensuring that every child has access to quality education.

GPE's Unique Approach

Suppose a rich country, say the UK, wants to give foreign aid to improve education in a poor country, say Malawi. There is an enormous literature comparing the cost-effectiveness of everything from buying free eyeglasses for students to paying performance bonuses to teachers. Everyone involved is painfully aware how redundant this looks. GPE’s unique selling point is its single-minded focus on basic education, and its fairly streamlined, no-strings-attached approach to funding poor countries’ own education plans.

Funding Channels: A Comparative Analysis

Between 2016 and 2018, about $9.45 billion per year in foreign aid was earmarked for education. There are multiple channels through which donors can provide aid, each with its own characteristics:

One hop: In the most direct channel, donors gave about $5.8 billion in direct bilateral aid for education programs to African governments between 2016 and 2018. This allows donors to target specific projects in specific countries.
Two hops: Donors contribute about $23 billion on an annualized basis to the World Bank’s International Development Agency (IDA), the bank’s fund for the poorest countries, which then makes concessional loans to developing countries.
Three hops: In the least direct channel, donors also give money to pooled funds like GPE. Most of that money passes from GPE to the World Bank or UNICEF, and a large chunk of that then ends up funding education programs in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the GPE money actually flows back to bilateral aid agencies, such as the UK’s own Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, to administer alongside the UK’s own bilateral aid programs.

The one-hop, bilateral aid channel allows donors to target specific projects. But the whole point of multilateral organizations is that they have fixed rules for how money is allocated across countries, and how projects are chosen and approved. And the recipients, i.e. the Malawian government, generally get some say in how the money is used. The money isn’t always going to end up in the same place, and that’s often for the best.

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Overhead Costs and Agency Fees

For each new entity along the GPE funding chain, there are overhead costs, which help run programs but also add up. After funds reach GPE, which charges an average of 5 percent overhead each year for its administrative costs (including the operating expenses and trustee budgets), money then passes on to grant agents, who charge their own agency and supervision fees (both comprising overhead costs). For example, UN agencies are one GPE grant agent and tend to charge 7 percent of the grant amount in agency fees, while the World Bank has a lower agency fee (1.75 percent). Similarly, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) charge 6 percent in agency fees and 18 percent in supervision fees, though there are only three GPE countries (Somalia, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea) where NGOs are the grant agents. Of course, these fees help run programs, but what we don’t know is the value for money (or expertise delivered per dollar spent) for these widely varying overhead costs.

GPE vs. IDA: A Comparison of Focus

Given the big overlap in GPE and IDA countries, are both funds spending the education aid money on similar sub-groups of countries? Not quite. GPE spends a majority of its funds on low-income economies, including fragile and conflict-affected countries-a focus that has only increased over time since 2004. GPE uses a need-based allocation formula to determine allocation, with additional weighting for fragile and conflict-affected countries. IDA, in comparison, has a relatively smaller focus on low-income countries as a proportion of its total spending on education, and a much larger focus on “lower middle income” countries, though its total spending in dollar amounts is higher for both low-income and lower-middle income countries due to its larger overall budget envelope.

More than the type of countries that receive GPE’s money, a bigger difference lies in sectoral prioritization. GPE spends the vast majority (82 percent) of its budget directly on basic education.

Governance and Decision-Making

Perhaps the biggest difference between GPE and other funding bodies lies in its governance and decision-making structure. GPE is governed by a constituency-based board of directors, with 20 members, representing developing countries, civil society organizations (CSOs), multilateral agencies, donor countries, and private sector organizations. In IDA, on the other hand, the voting share of each of the 173 members is largely determined by their financial contribution to the World Bank. The five largest donors (US, UK, China, France, and Germany) appoint five members on the 25-member board, while the remaining elected members represent all the remaining countries.

GPE has a relatively larger share of developing country representation compared to IDA, and prioritizes consensus-building in its board decisions. If all efforts to build consensus fail, GPE uses majority voting, but the majority vote must include at least one vote in favor from each key constituency, including developing countries, donor countries, multilateral agencies, and others.

Challenges and Criticisms

Multi-stakeholder governance has its downsides. The need for consensus on a board representing widely divergent interests can lead to gridlock. GPE’s share of total basic education aid to low-income and lower-middle-income countries fell to 6.7 percent from 11.4 percent between 2014 and 2018-a fall that may potentially be explained by the abrupt decline in disbursements in 2018-2019 after a slowdown in grant approvals. Fights within the big tent of the GPE board have also led to paralysis on key thematic issues.

Country-Specific Examples of GPE's Impact

GPE supports various countries in their efforts to improve education. Here are some examples:

Ethiopia: The current GPE grant of US$100 million is channeled into improving learning conditions in primary and secondary schools and strengthening institutions at different levels of educational administration.
Papua New Guinea: The PNG program is financed by a US$7.4 million grant that includes US$3.5 million from the GPE Multiplier, which will mobilize US$10.6 million in additional co-financing from the Government of Japan. The additional financing from the Government of Japan and the GPE Multiplier grant will support PNG to improve the quality of learning in classrooms by supporting the National Department of Education to develop, procure, and distribute elementary math textbooks and teachers’ manuals in the most disadvantaged and poorly performing provinces. In addition, ESPIG Multiplier funds will also contribute to scholarships to female students’ teachers.
The Gambia: The education sector support program (ESSP), supported in part by a US$5.3 million GPE grant, aims to increase access to early childhood and basic education. This is achieved by improving school infrastructure, offering second-chance programs and conditional cash transfers, and providing quality improvement interventions such as a curriculum reform, textbook distribution, teacher standards development and training, and strengthening EMIS and monitoring of learning outcomes. GPE supports mother tongue education as a key component of the foundation of learning.
Pakistan: The US$66 million GPE grant aimed to strengthen the institutional capacity to generate, disseminate and use information to support the implementation of key reforms under the education sector plan.
Nigeria: The GPE grant of US$100 million is supporting the Nigeria Partnership for Education Project (NIPEP). The federal ministry of education and the ministries of education of the five selected states lead the program in partnership with the World Bank as the grant agent.
Niger: With the support of GPE, Niger’s Ministry of Education is piloting a new curriculum in 500 schools in three regions of the country, including Niamey, the capital. The new curriculum and the textbooks that accompany it have also been made more relevant to the lives of the students who are using them.
Organization of Eastern Caribbean States: The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Commission received a US$298,500 Education Sector Plan Development Grant to finalize and appraise the OESS and a US$316,000 Program Development Grant to develop a multi-country program implementation grant application in 2014.

The Role of the European Union

The European Union is the main investor in education worldwide. It dedicates to global education in a life-long learning approach more than 10% of its International Partnerships budget, over €6 billion. The EU invests in education with a life-long learning approach, covering basic and higher education, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), research, and mobility. The EU and Team Europe represent 53% of total donor contributions to GPE. In 2022, 9 in 10 GPE implementation grants included support for teachers, trainings and teaching materials, and 675 000 teachers were trained with GPE funding.

To reach learners caught up in crisis in innovative ways, the EU developed the programme Building Resilience: education opportunities in fragile and crisis affected environments (BRiCE).

GPE 2025: A Strategic Plan for the Future

GPE 2025 is the partnership’s strategic plan for 2021 to 2025 and is aligned with SDG 4. Over the 2021-2025 period, GPE will accelerate children’s access to education while improving learning and catalyzing greater equity and gender equality.

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