The International Finance Facility for Education
The International Finance Facility for Education, or IFFEd, was launched at the Transforming Education Summit in September 2022 by UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Gordon Brown, the UN Special Envoy for Global Education.
IFFEd is a powerful new financing engine for global education. It is specifically designed to tackle the education crisis in lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) which are home to 80% of the world’s children, and where 1 in 5 children are out of school.
With a goal to make up for lost funding allocated to education, IFFEd is a direct response to education budget cuts around the world and the need to leverage scarce resources in the face of compounding crises. From 2019-2020, 43 donors reduced their bilateral aid to education, and 40% of low- and lower-middle-income countries reduced their education budgets.
IFFEd complements existing grant instruments like the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and Education Cannot Wait (ECW) and fills a critical gap in the international financing architecture for education. In the current resource-constrained environment, IFFEd multiplies donor dollars seven times, which means that for every $1 of traditional aid, IFFEd provides $7. IFFEd will provide an initial $2 billion in additional affordable funding for education programs to be disbursed starting in 2023 and could unlock an extra $10 billion of additional financing for education and skills by 2030.
IFFEd will initially focus on the Asia and Africa regions, in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the African Development Bank (AfDB), before expanding globally. IFFEd requires no new actors at the country level, relying on existing institutions forging new partnerships to secure and enhance funding.
“The International Finance Facility for Education is aimed at getting financing to lower-middle-income countries – home to half the world’s children and youth – and to the majority of the world’s displaced and refugee children. In time, we expect it to grow into a $10 billion facility to educate tomorrow’s generation of young people. I congratulate Special Envoy Gordon Brown and all the countries and institutions involved in getting this facility off the ground. And I urge all international donors and philanthropic organizations to back it.”
- UN Secretary-General António Guterres
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