Funding trends

What are the important trends in education funding?

2022 saw a slight increase in absolute ODA for education, however, the downward trend of percentage of total ODA allocated to education has continued since its peak in 2019.

Included in this total ODA to education is some funding that remains in donor countries to pay for scholarships and other ‘imputed student costs' associated with students from low- and middle-income countries studying in OECD countries. In 2022, these costs incurred in donor countries totaled US$4.1 billion. To get a more accurate picture of a donor’s cross-border flows of education, these costs must be subtracted from the totals below, making the effective total ODA to education US$8.1 billion in 2022.

Top donors

Who are the top donors to education?

In 2022, top donors were Germany, France, the US, Japan, and Italy.

These numbers include scholarships and other costs of students from ODA -recipient countries studying in donor-countries, which are high in Germany (US$2 billion in 2021) and France (US$927 million in 2020). When excluding these costs, Germany still remains the largest donor, followed by the US, France, the UK, and Japan.

The picture changes when looking at the share of donors’ total funding going towards education: In relative terms, the top DAC donors are Hungary, Portugal, Austria, and Slovenia, including in-country education costs.

Note to avoid double-counting, the EU Institutions are not included as a donor in the ranking of total education ODA.

What are the top sectors in education?

Higher education, primary education, and education policy and administrative management were the sub-sectors that received the most funding in 2022.

What are the key debates and topics surrounding education?

Education and SDG #4 is frequently framed as a prerequisite for poverty reduction: Many low- and lower-middle-income countries rely on international support to fund domestic education systems.

However, global education funding gaps have worsened following the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated learning losses and disrupted education systems worldwide. In 2023, UNESCO estimated that, between 2023 and 2030, there will be an annual funding gap averaging US$97 billion in low- and lower-middle-income countries to achieve SDG #4.

Education is commonly considered as an issue that intersects with other donor priorities: These priorities are typically gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. There has been an increasing interest in the climate-education nexus, though it does not yet feature strongly on agendas in national and international policy spaces.

The inaugural Transforming Education Summit, held in 2022, was organized to elevate education to the top of the global political agenda in response to a 'global education crisis' characterized by issues of equity, inclusion, and quality. More than 130 countries pledged to reform their education systems and accelerate action to end the crisis.

The 2024 Summit of the Future highlighted the critical role of quality education, skills development, and access to decent work as foundational pillars of the 2030 Agenda: Representatives called for increased investments in areas with significant synergy, particularly education and gender. The Pact for the Future adopted after the summit pledged to increase investments in people, particularly in quality, inclusive education and lifelong learning.

Many actors in the global education space have aligned around the indicator of learning poverty: The Learning Poverty measure was developed by the World Bank and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. For donors, addressing learning poverty means ensuring their programs support children to be able to read and understand a simple text by age 10. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic and related interruptions to the provision of education, learning poverty rates in 2019 were estimated to be 57% in low- and middle-income countries and 86% in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many donors have aimed to address this imbalance through support for foundational learning, which includes foundational literacy and numeracy.