Find the latest Education Finance Watch here
Education Finance Watch 2022 (EFW), an annual report on the global state of education financing jointly produced by the World Bank (WB), the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), finds that despite the significant learning losses stemming from the COVID-related school closures, in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, half of the sample of countries analyzed reduced their annual real spending on education. Since the onset of the pandemic, overall bilateral aid to education has fallen, while households continue to take on a large share of education costs in low-income countries.
The EFW uses various sources of data, including from UNESCO, the WB, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The EFW 2022 sheds further light on the impact of COVID-19 on global education financing in 2020, 2021, and 2022 and conducts a focused analysis of recent trends in government education budgets, and Official Development Assistance (ODA), using the latest data available for high-income (HICs), low-income and lower-middle income countries (LICs and LMICs), as of May 2022.