This toolkit has been produced by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) in collaboration with ActionAid International (AAI) and Education International (EI), and with funding from the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). It aims to support civil society organisations and education activists across low- and middle-income countries to advocate and campaign on issues related to financing for education, as a strategic focus area of the GCE movement.
It is also a result of increasing interest in advocacy around domestic financing for education as identified through GCE’s Civil Society Education Fund (CSEF) programme (GCE website).
Aims
The ultimate goal of the toolkit is to contribute to ambitious and robust advocacy and campaigns around domestic financing for equitable and quality education by supporting coalitions, teachers’ unions, CSOs and other education activists in low- and middle-income countries to influence budgets and policy processes in a way which leads to greater budget allocations and more effective expenditure.
Specifically, the toolkit aims to:
- Provide accessible information to support budget and finance advocacy for increased and better government spending to deliver quality and equitable education for all by 2030.
- Assist education activists to enhance their understanding of budget processes, including by carrying out practical exercises to build real-life budget analysis and tracking skills.
- Help education activists build an understanding of new issues in domestic education financing – in particular, trends around financing of the new Education 2030 Framework for Action, policy issues related to tax justice, and financing to promote equitable, quality education – to ensure advocacy strategies are fit for purpose to respond to these emerging trends.
- Help build new skills for those who have little background in budget related policy, analysis and advocacy, while also advancing new knowledge around emerging advocacy areas for those with extensive experience in budget work.
- Support thinking around how to develop an advocacy programme around these issues.
Target Audience
- The main audience is anyone who wants to campaign to get more and better domestic financing in support of a quality and equitable education for all! Therefore, the toolkit aims to support all civil society education campaigners, representatives of coalitions, teachers’ unions, and other education activists in developing, low- and middle-income countries.
- The toolkit is adaptable to different contexts, and aims to be as broad-based in its scope as possible. This will enable coalitions, unions and networks to use it as a basis to train members and partners in-country and to choose topics most applicable to their context. It may be used by education activists who are focused on budget work on education but also those who are working more broadly on public financing issues and who wish to connect with education actors.