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Op-ed by Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil. Article published on 14 November 2024 in French newspaper .

Education is one of the most powerful levers for reducing poverty worldwide and achieving greater equity and inclusion. This conviction has been placed at the heart of the G20 agenda (to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 18 and 19), at the initiative of the Brazilian presidency and UNESCO, which is the privileged partner.

But today, education itself is undermined by inequality. UNESCO's new , presented at the end of October in Fortaleza, Brazil, pointed out that 251 million children and young people worldwide are still deprived of school. They represent 33% of children in low-income countries, compared with 3% of children in high-income countries [according to World Bank categories]. More than half of these out-of-school youth are in the Sub-Saharan Africa region alone.

When they do go to school, students are still along way from receiving the same quality of education and therefore having the same chances of success, given the huge disparities in education funding. According to new data published by UNESCO and the World Bank, in 2022, low-income countries spent an average of just $55 per learner per year, compared with $8,532 for high-income countries.

This under-investment in education by some countries is not a matter of choice. It is the consequence of public finances being bled dry by the lack of financial resources. According to the International Monetary Fund, 60% of low-income countries are over-indebted or at high risk of debt distress.

By 2022, debt servicing costs on the African continent had reached an amount comparable to that of public education budgets. In the same year, [emanating from developed to developing countries] devoted to education fell to 7.6%, compared with 9.3% in 2019.

This triple crisis – of poverty, education and debt – can be broken through international solidarity and innovative financing mechanisms, including debt-for-education swaps.

Several bilateral initiatives have paved the way in recent years. Between 2002 and 2011, Indonesia and Germany ran a pilot program that gradually canceled over 77 million euros of debt in exchange for building new schools and funding scholarships for doctoral students and researchers. In 2006, Cameroon and France signed an agreement to redirect over 1 billion euros of debt to finance a 10-year education strategy.

Between 2006 and 2017, Peru and Spain also experimented with such a scheme, reinvesting 27 million of debt in the development of education in the Peruvian regions most affected by poverty. Brazil is running a similar initiative at the national level: Part of the interest on state debts to the federal government is converted into investment in education.

We now benefit from sufficient feedback in this area to imagine being able to change scale: moving from bilateral initiatives to a global initiative. Following on from the work carried out by the G20 on these issues for several years now, which in 2020 led to the definition of the first common framework for debt restructuring, we are today calling on States to consider a multilateral framework fully dedicated to the conversion of debt into sustainable financing for education.

This framework would enable the countries most exposed to overindebtedness to negotiate the waiver of certain debts in exchange for a commitment to invest the same sums in education in a fair and transparent manner.

It would draw on the full range of stakeholders who set the standard in this field: forums like the G20, UN system organizations like UNESCO, and funding platforms like the .

This need to rethink the financing of education is part of a broader call to reinvent the international architecture of development financing, as promoted by Brazil in the context of its G20 presidency.

The time has come to give global governance the ambition and resources to respond appropriately to the scale of the challenges we face.