"250 million children worldwide are out of the classroom"

The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is the largest global fund dedicated solely to building strong and resilient education in lower-income countries worldwide. For two decades, GPE has been working in countries racked by poverty and conflict — so that more children, especially girls, can get the education they need. 

Laura Frigenti has been CEO of GPE since February 2021. Prior to that she led the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation and held senior roles at the World Bank. We spoke with Ms. Frigenti on the sidelines of our third OPEC Fund Development Forum in June.

Are we on track to achieve the various targets of SDG 4 - Quality Education by 2030? What areas need more investment? Do different regions have different needs?

We are unfortunately not on track and the bad news is that all the good progress made in previous decades has been partly reversed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has kept schools closed in some countries for about three years. The bad news is that we see that children are not coming back — at least not in the volumes that we would like to see. And the particularly bad news is that girls are not coming back as much as boys are.

The needs are pretty much the same across all regions. We need to bring back into school those 250 million children worldwide that are out of the classroom at the moment. We need to make sure that when they are in the classroom they learn something. At the moment, in low-income countries worldwide, seven out of 10 children complete grade four and still cannot read or write a simple sentence, which means that all these investments in education haven’t actually brought good results.

Clearly, the needs are highest and most acute in regions with strong demographic push. Some large countries in Africa will see their school-age populations double in size by 2050, so we need to act urgently to prepare for what is going to happen over the next decades.

How can we give extra help to the most vulnerable, such as girls and children with disabilities?

At GPE our mantra is that education must be completely inclusive. No child should be left behind, irrespective of ethnicity or special needs or religion. We want to make sure that each and every child has the same opportunities.

In the specific case of girls and vulnerable girls, a lot of the work needs to be done with the community. It’s often parents and the community at large that do not appreciate how important it is for girls, indeed all children, to be in school. That is our starting point, which is now yielding some good results.

What innovations can improve access to education? How can we best apply new technologies, policies and processes to ensure maximum impact?

The single most important thing is for governments to understand that nobody should be left behind. We then need to work closely with local leaders to understand what are the bottlenecks. For example, why do parents decide not to send children to school? Is it because the school is far from home and they think the journey is dangerous for girls? We have to correct that.

I would say that the most important innovation is actually something simple: You have to be grounded in local reality to understand what the specificity of your problems are.

How important are partnerships for tackling development challenges?

Partnerships are fundamental. We discussed that today at this very well-organized development day at the OPEC Fund — the fact that none of us can do what needs to be done alone. We all have to work together. We bring different skills, we bring different things and it's important that we continue working with this philosophy.