Fourth annual meeting of the Global Education Coalition: Key Takeaways

The fourth annual meeting of the Global Education Coalition saw over 100 of the Coalition’s members travel to Paris to participate in a day packed with critical conversations and opportunities for collaboration that we can take forward in the months and years to come.   

Reflecting on the past four years, the Coalition plays a key role in facing the challenges of a rapidly evolving education landscape. However, we have much work left to do. This work calls for ambition, for dedication, for transparency and for sustained partnerships from all stakeholders.  

As the Coalition enters its fifth year of action, here are my three key takeaways from Monday’s discussions:  

• Multistakeholder partnerships are pivotal for driving education transformation, particularly in the areas of digitalization and funding. But cooperation must happen at the national level - to ensure alignment in funding and priorities between partners and the government - and at the international levels - viewing education policy as purely domestic prevents us from really taking innovative approaches to scale. 

  Every country in the world should have a multistakeholder coalition like the Digital Transformation Collaborative. If the future is built only by one actor, we will fail. It has to be multi-stakeholder; it has to be whole-of-government. And this requires building trust – across these different sectors - to create bolder partnerships. 

• Digital technology holds significant potential for the transformative innovation we need. However, we know that equity and inclusion have not driven global digital transformation and that the biggest digital divides impact low-income countries, rural, and disadvantaged communities. We also know there are major data gaps. There’s a clear need to bolster evidence and build trust and transparency around EdTech for sustainable partnerships that are steered by country needs.   
• Teacher involvement is crucial at every stage - from the design of digital solutions to the testing, and then in the rollout and scaling of these technologies. We must also work to consistently develop the capacities of teachers globally so that they can keep up with the rapid changes in digital technologies and effectively and efficiently leverage these as tools for teaching and learning.