The Global Education Monitoring Report has launched #MakeitPublic, a new advocacy campaign calling on governments and regional organisations to report on education progress to their citizens.
The#MakeitPublic campaign encourages countries to take steps towards producing a regular education monitoring report. This report would capture progress on education commitments – including those on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 across all education levels, and government education expenditure. This initiative is linked to a core recommendation from the 2017-18 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, Accountability in education: meeting our commitments.
The GEM Report’s campaign also calls on all governments to:
· Make education monitoring reports publicly available to their citizens, including on the internet
· Use their national education monitoring reports as key sources for the education section of their SDG national voluntary reviews
All regional organisations with an education agenda should also produce regional education monitoring reports, based on their regional education strategies and monitoring frameworks. These could then influence national approaches to monitoring education.
Accountability
National monitoring reports are the tool through which governments capture progress on education commitments to report it to their citizens. While non-government organisations (NGOs) fulfil this reporting role in many countries, a government report carries special weight. As citizens need a regular report on the implementation of the national education strategy or plan to hold governments to account, such a document can demonstrate the executive’s commitment to transparency and to communicating government expenditure, activities, and results to citizens in an accessible manner.
Varying levels of reporting
The GEM Report has created a special page on its website to show which countries and regional organisations produce education monitoring reports and provides links to the most up-to-date reports. Only half of the world’s governments produced such reports between 2010 and 2016. Only one in four did so annually.
The reports analysed by the 2017-18 GEM Report vary in their coverage. Almost all covered primary and secondary education, about three-quarters covered early childhood care and education, about two-thirds covered tertiary education and one-third covered adult education. This does not necessarily mean that countries did not report on other levels; rather, it reflects dispersed responsibility among government bodies.
Reports also vary in their relative emphasis on assessing the current situation, describing ministry actions relative to a government programme of work, and reporting on expenditure. A content analysis suggests that about six out of ten mainly focus on actions taken and one in four on the current situation.
#MakeitPublic campaign’s actions
With this campaign, you can:
· Find out whether and when your country produced an education monitoring report.
· Write to and/or tag your Minister of Education on Twitter, showing him/her this issue is important to you. Use the campaign’s template letter and template tweets.
· Email your national education coalition to say you want to join them in making this a priority.
The#MakeitPublic campaign has already received the endorsement of the SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee and a set of country champions are being recruited to be regional spokespeople for the campaign.
Education International’s affiliates are invited to endorse this campaign, by sharing their organisation’s name and logo so they can be featured on the #MakeitPublic campaign webpage.