Recognizing that the coronavirus pandemic is also an education crisis, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) underscored the need to protect the share of education in total aid -- noting that the COVID-19 threatens the support to education back by six years.
UNESCO, in an emailed statement, estimates that global aid is “likely to decline” by up to $2 billion from 2018 to 2022 as a result of recession caused by COVID-19. This entails a 12 percent drop in international support for education.
A new policy paper by the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report showed that total aid to education “reached its highest ever levels in 2018” which is the latest available year. Without new measures, UNESCO warned that aid to education would only reach 2018 levels in 2024 -- which poses a “serious threat to the recovery of education from the unprecedented disruption caused by the pandemic.”
UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay cautioned that a just as aid to education seemed to have recovered its lost momentum, the COVID-19 pandemic “threatens to take us back several years.”
“Faced with the havoc wreaked by the pandemic, aid to education will arguably be more important than ever before,” Azoulay said. Countries, he added, will need additional funding to respond to the pandemic. “Education must be prioritized both in terms of aid and domestic allocations to avoid a setback to the global education goal, SDG 4,” he added.
UNESCO noted that aid to education in 2018 reached a record $15.6 billion, an increase of nine percent from the previous year. From one year to the next, aid rose by six percent for basic education, seven percent for secondary education, and 12 percent for post-secondary education, providing each with the highest amount of aid ever recorded.
“Despite these increases, more effective aid to the sector was required: Only $7.4 billion, or 47 percent of aid to education went to basic and secondary education in low- and lower-middle-income countries, the two sub-sectors and two country groups perceived as most in need,” UNESCO explained.
Assessing the impact of COVID-19, the Global Report estimates that the pandemic is likely to have a “more damaging impact than the financial crisis of 2007-2008 as the recession affecting the Top 10 bilateral donors for education is expected to be more than twice as severe.”
“If current national spending levels on education as a percentage of GDP were maintained, national funding for education would decrease by $296 billion in 2020, further aggravating the situation,” UNESCO estimated.
GEM Report Director Manos Antoninis explained that an estimated $8 trillion has been committed to pandemic responses by governments so far, helping secure their health systems and economies. “But prospects for aid are linked to the impact of the crisis on donor budgets,” he said.
Antoninis noted that previous financial crises have impacted the allocation of aid for several years after the crises were over. “We should therefore not underestimate the ricochet effect this pandemic could have on social services for years to come,” he added.