PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Leadership in Education
This article is part of the Research TopicThe right to education and addressing inequalities: Examining new forms of privatisation, impact of digitalisation and learning in crisis situationsView all 7 articles
Delivering the Financing needed to Progressively Realise the Right to Education
Provisionally accepted
- ActionAid International, Johannesburg, South Africa
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There is an obligation on states and the international community to mobilise the maximum of available resources for the progressive realisation of the right to education. But in most parts of the world, public education systems have been chronically underfunded for decades, in particular owing to the IMF's coercive policy advice on austerity. This has exacerbated inequalities and created space for different forms of privatisation - as a growing number of people opt out of failing public provision. But there are alternatives, not least those laid out at the Heads of State Transforming Education Summit in 2022. The focus needs to be on enhancing sustainable domestic financing for education. Aid and loans only make up 3% of funding for education with domestic resource mobilisation making up 97%. Whilst some progress can be made by encouraging government to spend 20% of their national budgets on education, true transformation depends on national and international action on the size of overall government budgets – engaging strategically on tax justice, debt justice and ending austerity.
Keywords: Financing education, Right to education, Tax justice, Debt justice, austerity and education, transforming financing, International monetary fund (IMF)
Received: 28 Jul 2025; Accepted: 28 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Archer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: David Archer
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