Delivering the financing needed to progressively realize the right to education

Archer, David

doi:10.3389/feduc.2025.1674739

PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Educ., 21 January 2026

Sec. Leadership in Education

Volume 10 - 2025 | https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1674739

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 9 articles

Delivering the financing needed to progressively realize the right to education

David Archer^*

ActionAid International, Johannesburg, South Africa

There is an obligation on states and the international community to mobilize the maximum of available resources for the progressive realization 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 privatization - 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 mobilization 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.

Introduction

Some aspects of the right to education are “absolute” and immediately binding in all contexts, such as non-discrimination, but many of the key provisions in international human rights law framework are subject to “progressive realization,” meaning that low-income countries are only expected to guarantee them as resources permit. Some inequalities in education may result from clear discrimination and should be directly contested but probably many more inequalities arise from under-resourced education systems that end up reproducing, rather than overcoming, inequalities in wider society. Well-resourced public education systems are surely critical to addressing inequalities in all contexts, so how can we best understand and accelerate “progressive realization?”

General Comment 3, adopted by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1990) outlines core obligations on States in relation to progressive realization, asserting that governments should take deliberate, concrete and progressive steps “to the maximum of available resources” and should not allow “retrogression.” The Committee also underscored that the phrase “to the maximum of its available resources” refers both to the resources existing within a State and those available from the international community through international cooperation and assistance.

How should we measure whether states and international actors are complying with this obligation to mobilize the “maximum of available resources?” Perhaps the most well-established benchmark is that governments in low-income countries ought to be spending 20% of their budgets on education. This benchmark is based on research by Bruns et al. (2003) at the World Bank and was asserted initially by the Education for All Fast Track Initiative in 2002. This forms part of the Incheon Framework for Action (UNESCO, 2016) agreed in 2015 for delivering on the education sustainable development goal. The Incheon framework uses an unclear phrasing, that governments should allocate “at least 15% – 20% of total public expenditure to education” with the expectation that the least developed countries may need to invest more than 20%. Some governments certainly fall short of this measure – notably Pakistan and Nigeria, the two countries with the largest number of children out of school, who both spend under 10% of their national budget on education. While some countries reach exceed this key benchmark, they still lack sufficient resources to guarantee the right to quality education for all their citizens.

In 2022 the UN Heads of State Transforming Education Summit (United Nations, 2022a), on paper the highest level education meeting in history (as Presidents and Prime Ministers have never previous gathered exclusively to discuss education), introduced some critical new elements that can guide us in determining whether countries are mobilizing the maximum of available resources – and whether international actors are helping or obstructing these efforts. A substantial discussion paper was produced by the finance track in advance of the (United Nations, 2022b) summit and this informed the Call to Action on Financing Education (United Nations, 2022b) launched by the UN Secretary General. Three key elements warrant highlighting – relating to tax, debt and austerity policies, each of which profoundly affect the overall size of government budgets. This is crucial because even a 20% share of a small budget will be a small amount – so we need to determine whether governments are mobilizing a sufficient amount in overall revenue and whether they are able to allocate this to education.

Tax justice and education

In terms of tax, low-income countries have an average tax-to GDP ratio of just 16%, compared with high-income countries that have a ratio of 30% or 40%. In 2019, in a paper on how to finance the SDGs, the IMF suggested that tax reforms were crucial and estimated that low-income countries could increase their tax to GDP ratio by five percentage points in the medium term – reaching an average of 21%. In most cases, this would allow a doubling of spending on education and health, as well as some other public services. Given this analysis one would expect this to be a centerpiece of IMF policy advice to low-income countries but there is no evidence of this happening in practice. Indeed, the IMF default is to recommend cuts to public spending rather than increases in tax revenue – and when tax reforms are suggested they tend to be modest and focused on regressive taxes like VAT that put the biggest burden on those on lowest incomes, deepening inequality. This feels like clear example where international assistance for countries wanting to mobilize the maximum of available resources is falling short – in violation of the ICESCR Article 11.

The TES Call to Action calls for governments to “commit to reach an adequate tax-to-GDP ratio as required, through ambitious and progressive tax reforms with linked commitments toward financing educational investment.” It also called for the international community to “prioritize global actions on taxes, supporting international reforms that can help countries increase their tax income in a rapid and progressive way” including through “global action on tax loopholes, agreements on a global asset register, the reduction of illicit financial flows, unfair trade taxation, acting on tax havens and promoting a process for setting fair global tax rules.”

The agenda laid out was clear, but relatively little has been done in practice to advance the case for this, with most international donors and multilateral actors in the education space avoiding explicit engagement on tax issues in the 3 years since TES. There is a failure to acknowledge that an active involvement by education actors on global tax issues could help to accelerate much needed tax reforms. For 60 years the wealthier nations linked to the OECD have been setting and enforcing global tax rules – which have in practice benefited wealthy countries and failed to prevent huge sums leaving low-income countries in illicit financial flows (African Union, 2021). Education, perhaps along with health, is the most powerful human face to present in making the case for global tax reforms and the reluctance to participate in making this case is another violation of the guidance from ICESCR.

Nevertheless, there have been some wider positive developments on international tax. The Africa Group at the UN has championed global tax reforms by winning a UN General Assembly vote in 2023 (African Union, 2023) to move the setting of global tax rules away from the OECD to a more representative UN based body through developing a new Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation. The Global Campaign for Education (2024b) has prioritized supporting this new tax convention, recognizing the critical importance for education financing – but (Global Campaign for Education, 2024b) bilateral donors and multilateral actors are still failing to step up to support such a reform.

Debt justice and education

The latest analysis (ActionAid, 2025) of all low and lower-middle income countries shows that over half of them are spending more on debt servicing than on education and 54 countries are in debt crisis. Low-income countries are forced to repay wealthy creditors (increasingly private and commercial banks in the Global North, alongside China), even where some of the debts incurred are considered illegitimate or problematic because they were based on irresponsible lending or did not get effectively used (with loan money often disappearing into foreign bank accounts and not being used for national development). The IMF effectively enforces these debt payments even if they have to be made at the cost of spending on education.

The TES call to action was very clear about needing to address debt if countries are to finance quality public education. It urged the international community to “Support action on debt relief, restructuring, and in some cases, cancellation, for any countries spending more on debt servicing than education.” It also called for governments to help “[r]evise the international financial and debt architecture …including by removing conditionalities that require cutting expenditure on education as a pre-requisite to attain new financing.”

As with tax, the urgency of strategic action on debt has not been championed sufficiently by the international education community since TES. Some education actors have started making the case for debt for education swaps (UNESCO, 2023), but these are unproven and indeed widely considered to be ineffective (Debt Justice, 2024). Agreeing a UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt – which could create a fairer system for resolving debt crises would be truly transformative, but the education community was not consistently vocal in supporting this at the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville (UNDESA, 2025) – where approval to decolonise the international financial architecture was blocked by European states (Eurodad, 2025).

Austerity and education

The TES call to action on finance made some important observations about the need for Ministries of Finance and Governments to “factor in long-term returns to investment in education so that education spending is not seen purely as a consumption expenditure in medium term expenditure frameworks and other planning / budget documents.” For far too long Finance Ministries have been dissuaded from investing in education because they are caught in short and medium term thinking (ActionAid, 2024), within which education does not yield significant economic returns. This is very much informed by the IMF who urge a balancing of the books in the short and medium term and who enforce this by urging cuts to public spending.

Policy advice around austerity has been the default guidance of the IMF since the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and whilst their global rhetoric has shifted, their practice at country level has not (ActionAid, 2023). The center-piece of IMF austerity policies is the imposition of cuts or freezes to public sector wage bills (ActionAid, 2021). The impression is given that this is about cutting back bloated government bureaucracies – but in practice the largest single group on the public sector wage bill are education workers, followed by health workers. In a study on 15 countries (ActionAid, 2021) these IMF wage bill constraints were shown to have blocked the recruitment of over 3 million urgently needed teachers and nurses. Despite the devastating impact, the IMF advice was found to have no logic or rationale, with every country advised to cut the percentage of GDP spent on the public sector wage bill below both regional and global averages – contributing to a downward spiral globally.

The consequence of this IMF short-term thinking and coercive policy advice is that countries cannot recruit more teachers even if there are desperate teacher shortage or surges in enrolment in schools. This is often the single biggest obstacle to increasing spending on education. For this reason, the TES call to action called on the international community to: “Urge the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international financial institutions to address obstacles such as public sector wage constraints that prevent increased spending on education; and champion policies that will allow significant new recruitment of professional teachers wherever there are shortages.”

Of course, there are some contexts where countries face serious fiscal constraints as a result of problematic governments being reckless with public finances – but the scale of the debt crisis across 54 countries points to systemic global forces playing an important role in most cases. Moreover, the universality of the IMF recommendations around austerity and cuts to public sector age bills suggests that solutions are not tailor-made and credible alternatives are not considered.

Since TES there have been repeated efforts to engage the IMF’s senior leadership in a public dialogue around how their policies undermine education spending – and the IMF has repeatedly avoided such a dialogue (CNN, 2022) with global actors who are supporting progress on education through the High Level Steering Committee on SDG4. This is perhaps the clearest example of where international assistance is not just failing but pro-actively blocking the progressive realization of the right to education and preventing countries from mobilizing the maximum of available resources.

Conclusion

This opinion piece has focused on ways in which the international community has agreed to act to support the mobilization of maximum available resources for the progressive realization of the right to education – but has failed to deliver on these actions in practice. Of course, national governments have significant obligations to allocate a fair share of national budgets to education but there are often wider obstacles in the neoliberal economic system that block them from being able to expand their overall spending. One of the consequences is that public education systems have been chronically underfunded (Hill and Kumar, 2012) in most countries over the past 40 years, even in cases where governments have shown political will to invest in education. This leads to a loss of confidence in public provision as a whole and opens up the space for privatization of education, with the middle classes opting out and seeking private alternatives. This inevitably undermines the right to education as a whole, as made clear by the Abidjan Principles (2019).

Fortunately, there are a growing number of civil society initiatives seeking to highlight the strategic financing issues affecting the right to education. The Tax and Education Alliance (TaxEd) brings together global, regional national education movements and tax justice movements (Education Out Loud, 2025). The Global Campaign for Education (2024a) has a priority campaign for a UN Tax Convention and the Tax Justice Network (2024) have produced a landmark report on education. For the first time the Global Partnership for Education (2025) is explicitly recognizing that “domestic resources remain constrained by rising debt,” and its new replenishment campaign makes a commitment to “assess debt sustainability” and a reference to “expanding support for national tax and levy mechanisms.” But much more is needed to ensure that the public education systems are sustainably financed, and this will require consistently elevating an education voice in strategic finance discussions around tax, debt and austerity, both nationally and internationally.

Education ought to be one of the most powerful equalizing forces in any society, but when provision is fragmented and stratified by the ability of parents to pay, it becomes a way of entrenching inequality and injustice – and it is not just the right to education that is being violated.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in this study are included in this article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

DA: Writing – original draft.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

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References

Abidjan Principles (2019). Abidjan Principles on the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education. Cote d’Ivoire: The Abidjan Principles.