admin Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, and Gordon Brown, his special envoy for global education, on Saturday launched a multi-billion-dollar International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd).
The IFFEd first projects expected to launch in 2023 will be aimed at supporting education and skills development investments in countries that have lower-middle economies. With initial funding of $2 billion, the facility is expected to expand to $10 billion by 2030.
Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, two-thirds of countries around the world have been forced to cut their education budgets. Guterres finds this upsetting as he considers education to be the building block of peaceful, prosperous, stable societies.
In a press conference with Brown, he warned about the negative impact low onvestments have on the future. He said “Reducing investment basically guarantees more serious crises further down the line. We need to increase, not decrease, the amount of money into education systems.”
Wealthy countries are at an advantage as they have the ability to increase funding from domestic sources. On the other hand, many developing countries are struggling as they have been hit by a cost-of-living crisis. Guterres stressed that hese countries require urgent support for education, fuether adding that this is exactly the role of the IFFEd.
The IFFEd is not a new fund but a mechanism to increase the resources available to multilateral banks to provide low cost education finance. It will complement and work alongside existing tools that provide grants and other assistance, said Guterres, urging all international donors and philanthropic organizations to back the IFFEd.
Brown painted a scary picture with numbers; around 260 million school-age children do not go to school, 400 million children at the age of 11 are not able to read or write and leave education for good, and 840 million children and young people have no qualifications for the workplace of the future. Brown said that he IFFEd is to deal with this precise crisis.
“Over time, we expect the fund to grow from the two billion (dollars) that it will be initially, to five billion and then to 10 billion. This means that today, we’re announcing the biggest-ever single investment in global education that the world has seen, and we believe it can transform the prospects of millions of children,” he said.
Magazine 
