The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set ambitious targets for high-quality, universal education by 2030. But existing efforts to “cost the SDGs” return unattainable price tags. In this chapter, we first review approaches to costing the SDGs in the education sector.

In 2021, Ghana announced a plan to issue sovereign bonds of up to $2 billion, with proceeds due partially to fund a free secondary school program. Just months later, Ghana’s rising debt burden means this is no longer feasible. Can developing countries tap the social bond market in order to fund publ...

Consider the situation. Faced with growing fiscal stress, the government of an energy-exporting country decides to cut generous subsidies, doubling the price of fuel overnight. Protestors are out on the streets, clashing violently with security forces called in to maintain law and order. They vent t...

Germany supports the universal basic education goals of the SDGs, wants to eradicate global poverty and promotes multilateralism as the way to achieve these goals. So why does it route most of its education aid to higher education? Why does most of its aid go to upper-middle-income countries and its...

Prolonged school closures during COVID-19 meant that over 7.7 million Malawian children were out of formal schooling for over seven months. There is little information about the impacts of school closures and the COVID-19 crisis on these individuals. What happened to student participation over the t...

At the outset of the pandemic, CGD launched a website, g2p-network.org to facilitate a series of working groups exploring digital payments and COVID-19 and to highlight important findings in the vast and rapidly growing array of academic and policy work on G2P systems. Today, we’re launching a ...