Education sector has good components, but bad plumbing

Why global education’s problem isn’t scarcity. It’s that evidence, financing, implementation, and learning don’t connect.

Earlier this summer, four years after the Transforming Education Summit, the global education community gathered again at UNESCO in Paris to take stock of progress toward SDG 4. This month, the community makes the annual pilgrimage to UNGA where the conversations will again focus on what more can be done. Both moments invite a familiar question: how can the sector accelerate momentum?

The answer is uncomfortable but increasingly clear: global education now has many of the components it needs, but not enough of the plumbing to allow those components to effectively work together.

For decades, the dominant diagnosis of global education’s challenges has been scarcity. The sector needed more and better evidence to guide decisions, more innovation to crack persistent problems, more funding to widen access and lift quality, and more political attention to hold education on the global agenda. Those needs are real, and they are acute right now, as development assistance comes under strain and education budgets are squeezed in country after country. Yet, scarcity is no longer a sufficient diagnosis. The central problem is poor coherence.

The sector has spent decades assembling an extraordinary set of assets. We have a growing body of evidence about what improves learning. We have teaching and learning models proven to work across very different contexts. We have global funds, philanthropic initiatives, multilateral financiers, technical assistance mechanisms, private capital, and implementation partners. Taken one by one, many of these pieces are stronger than they have ever been. However, together, they too often behave like parallel systems rather than parts of a single, coherent whole.

The latest evidence routinely sits apart from financing decisions. Financing sits apart from the realities of implementation. Philanthropy operates next to the billions in public and multilateral finance, rarely inside the decisions that move them. The lessons generated through implementation rarely loop back into the next round of investment with any real speed or discipline. The result is predictable: capital does not reliably flow toward approaches supported by evidence, and good solutions stall well short of sustainable scale.

The same problem keeps reappearing in different costumes. We have more evidence than we can use, yet too little of it reaches a decision while the decision is still being made. Foundations increasingly want to engage with macro and development finance, even when it pulls them well outside their comfort zone, but the pathways to do so barely exist. We are sitting on enormous pools of untapped capital. Philanthropic foundations alone steward hundreds of billions of dollars in assets globally, yet only a small fraction is routinely connected to development and social impact outcomes.

The challenge is not simply mobilizing more money. It is building mechanisms that allow existing capital to work differently.

This is not an abstract problem. Much of my own work of the past several years across evidence, philanthropy, and education financing has been about building the missing connections. At Jacobs, we invested in a global research evidence repository built on the premise that so much of what research has already taught us—what works, what does not, and under what conditions—sits idle, out of reach of the decision-makers who need it. Evidence intermediaries, including EdLabs, respond to the same challenge: how to get evidence to sit alongside decisions, not in theory, but inside the messy politics of how decisions actually get made. Neither is a silver bullet. Both are bets on connective tissue.

This should change how the sector thinks about systems change. For years, the instinct in the face of an educational challenge has been to ask how to generate more: more evidence, more funding, more initiatives, more partnerships. This is not an argument against more research, innovation, or financing. All remain essential. But as the sector has matured, the challenge is increasingly not just generating more assets, but connecting them more effectively.

The answer lies in investing in the sector’s connective infrastructure: the institutions, mechanisms, incentives, and relationships that link evidence to decisions, connect innovation to scale, align philanthropy with macro and public finance, and close the loop between implementation and learning.

That matters more, not less, as money tightens. When resources are abundant, fragmentation is inefficient but can be navigated. When resources are scarce, fragmentation becomes a luxury we cannot afford. In a constrained environment, the ability to align the capital, knowledge, institutions, and capacity we already hold may count for more than our ability to generate anything new.

This is why the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd) matters in the current moment and why i’m choosing to join its mission.

IFFEd was created to help expand affordable education financing for lower-middle-income countries at a time when fiscal space is constrained and the need for investment is growing. Its financing model, using guarantees to multiply donor contributions seven-fold, rightly gets attention. But its broader relevance lies in the conversation it opens about how education finance can be better connected to evidence, implementation, and learning.

Additional financing will always be necessary. But financing has the greatest potential for impact when it is aligned with evidence about what works, connected to country priorities and implementation capacity, and accompanied by learning loops that inform future decisions. This is where innovative finance can contribute to the wider transformation agenda: not as a standalone solution, but as part of the connective infrastructure the sector needs.

For IFFEd, the opportunity is to act as dual multiplier, helping ensure that more capital reaches education systems in ways that are purposeful, evidence-informed, and aligned with long-term outcomes. In that sense, its value is not only in mobilizing finance, but in helping strengthen the links between financing, delivery, and learning.

The pathways that will make these connections viable are only just starting to be built. At UNGA, IFFEd will host a session with Foundation leaders on a philanthropic guarantee mechanism designed to help philanthropic balance sheets unlock substantially great scale and impact.The opportunity is significant. Guarantees equivalent to just 1% of education-focused philanthropic endowments could unlock up to $21 billion in additional financing for education in low- and middle-income countries; and integrate philanthropy into both the multilateral development system and national education plans, giving them a path to scale.

If many of the necessary components are already in place, conversations and roundtables at UNGA should focus on how to make them work better together. Are financing decisions informed by evidence? Are investments connected to implementation capacity? Are lessons from delivery shaping the next round of decisions? Are philanthropic, public, multilateral, and private resources aligned around country priorities and long-term outcomes?

Signs of a shift are beginning to appear. In education financing, there is growing recognition that sustainable financing is not simply about mobilizing additional resources but about better aligning domestic, donor, philanthropic, and private capital around long-term outcomes. A similar shift is underway in the evidence community, where the focus is moving from producing more studies toward ensuring that evidence is translated, accessed, and used.

Different parts of the sector are beginning to arrive at the same conclusion from different directions:

the next frontier is not just about accumulation, but connection.

If the past decade in global education was about building stronger individual components, the next must be about investing in the plumbing that allows the remarkable assets we already have to finally work together.

Donika Dimovska is the Senior Advisor for Philanthropy and Evidence at the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd) and was most recently Chief Knowledge Officer at the Jacobs Foundation.

2nd September 2026