Resources
Explore a wide range of valuable resources on GCED to deepen your understanding and enhance your research, advocacy, teaching, and learning.
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Can African Countries Afford Their National SDG 4 Benchmarks? Year of publication: 2024 Corporate author: UNESCO | Global Education Monitoring Report Team This brief paper follows the broad methodological approach of the two previous SDG 4 costing exercises and their main assumptions (UNESCO, 2015a; UNESCO, 2020). It introduces the SDG 4 benchmarking process and how to estimate the cost of achieving these targets set by countries, largely based on their sector plans. Finally, it presents the revised assumptions of the model and the key findings. Despite lowering ambition, there is still an average national financing gap of USD 78 billion per year in the 44 low- and lower-middle-income countries in Africa. 
Mainstreaming Social and Emotional Learning in Education Systems: Policy Guide Year of publication: 2024 Corporate author: UNESCO Why social and emotional learning is key to transform education Since 2015, there has been significant progress towards reimagining education for wider societal transformation in support of peace, justice, inclusion, equality and sustainability. Yet, the existing challenges have intensified, and new ones have emerged. The world is witnessing a resurgence of multiple forms of conflict and violence, from racism and discrimination, to hate speech and armed conflict. Our efforts to build sustainable peace through education are falling short. Some 250 million children are still out of school, and those in school are not acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills they need. This guide makes the case for integrating Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in collective efforts to transform education. It highlights the impact of SEL in improving academic achievement, reducing drop- out rates, and improving overall mental health and well-being, and importantly, in strengthening emotional and relational dynamics of classrooms, schools, communities, and societies. The guide synthesizes the latest research and practice from the world, including case studies of concrete SEL implementation. It provides policy-makers with preliminary guidance to facilitate their conceptualization and integration of SEL in all facets of their education systems to build long-lasting peace and sustainable development. 
Measuring Global Citizenship Education: A Collection of Practice and Tools Year of publication: 2017 Corporate author: Center for Universal Education at Brookings | UNESCO | UN Global Education First Initiative - Youth Advocacy Group (YAG) The idea of global citizenship has existed for several millennia. In ancient Greece, Diogenes declared himself a citizen of the world,1 while the Mahaupanishads of ancient India spoke of the world as one family.2 Today, education for global citizenship is recognized in many countries as a strategy for helping children and youth prosper in their personal and professional lives and contribute to building a better world.This toolkit is intended to shed light on one aspect of operationalizing global citizenship education (GCED): how it can be measured. This toolkit is the result of the collective efforts of the Global Citizenship Education Working Group (GCED-WG), a collegium of 90 organizations and experts co-convened by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution, and the United Nations Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Youth Advocacy Group (GEFI-YAG). To gather the measurement tools in this collection, the working group surveyed GCED programs and initiatives that target youth (ages 15–24).3 For the purposes of this project, GCED was defined as any educational effort that aims to provide the skills, knowledge, and experiences and to encourage the behaviors, attitudes, and values that allow young persons to be agents of long-term, positive changes in their own lives and in the lives of people in their immediate and larger communities (with the community including the environment).This toolkit begins with a brief review of opinions on why GCED is important and the variety of definitions of GCED. We follow the report with a catalog of 50 profiles of assessment efforts, each describing practices and tools to measure GCED at the classroom, local, and national levels. Note that the survey does not represent an exhaustive list but may be regarded as a living document that will grow as the field of GCED itself grows around the world.Broadly speaking, the assessment efforts in this survey may be categorized across achieving three goals: (1) fostering the values/attitudes of being an agent of positive change; (2) building knowledge of where, why, and how to take action toward positive change; and (3) developing self-efficacy for taking effective actions toward positive change.Today, global challenges such as climate change, migration, and conflict will require people to do more than just think about solutions. They will require effective action, by both individuals and communities. Education for global citizenship is one means to help young people develop the knowledge, skills, behaviors, attitudes, and values to engage in effective individual and collective action at their local levels, with an eye toward a long-term, better future at the global level. We offer this toolkit to provide guidance for educators, policymakers, non-governmental organizations, civil society, and researchers, and to inform this conversation. 
Developing a Monitoring Instrument to Measure Extracurricular and Non-formal Activities which Promote Global Citizenship Education (GCED) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Year of publication: 2016 Author: Bassel Akar Corporate author: UNESCO The goal on Education is 1 of 17 Sustainable Development Goals that comprises a target to ensure all learners around the world have an opportunity to develop the competencies to promote sustainable approaches to living, including appreciating of cultural diversity, non-violence, and gender equality. Extracurricular activities and non-formal education (ENA) provides a non-traditional space for learning global citizenship and sustainable development. Around the world, communities have organized education programs and activities for youth outside school to learn the values and practices of being global citizens. Research shows, however, that most efforts to review and improve ENA for global citizenship and sustainable development have focused on summative evaluations with little attention to formative approaches of monitoring. Drawing on basic principles of action research, sustainable professional development, and education quality enhancement, a monitoring framework emerges to support organizations around the world in measuring progress towards education for global citizenship and sustainable development. This framework also suggests (1) inclusive monitoring spaces like internal reviews and online social networking platforms, (2) roles of stakeholders like donor agencies in institutionalizing monitoring practices, (3) instruments and measurable scales to facilitate dialogues that review program objectives and action plans, and (4) challenges in inclusive and sustainable monitoring tools and approaches. 
Education for Global Citizenship Education & Sustainable Development: Content in Social Science Textbooks Year of publication: 2016 Author: Patrica Bromley | Julia Lerch | Jeremy Jimenez Corporate author: UNESCO In times of violence and egregious destruction of human lives and the natural world, our recognition of the need for education that promotes peace and justice becomes particularly pressing. This background report reviews the state of existing research and data on relevant sustainable development content in social science education in countries around the world. Specifically, it examines the extent to which textbook content could help learners acquire the knowledge, skills, and values needed to meet goal 4.7 of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals: “By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.” It reviews relevant literature and analyzes three cross-national, longitudinal databases containing information coded from textbook content to assess the current state of knowledge. The paper concludes by indicating where future research efforts are most needed, identifying geographic and substantive needs, and considering monitoring mechanisms that could encourage on-going evaluation and monitoring of textbook content. 
Evaluation of UNESCO's Capacity Development for Education for All (CapEFA) Programme Year of publication: 2016 Corporate author: UNESCO The main purpose of this evaluation is to determine the relevance and effectiveness of the Capacity Development for Education for All (CapEFA) programme’s overall contribution to progress towards the realization of the Education for All (EFA) goals in its target countries, and to provide actionable and timely recommendations to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the positioning of the Programme to meet future needs and challenges related to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in September 2015, and more specifically to the SDG 4 to ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. The focus of this evaluation is on assessing the CapEFA programme’s relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability. This evaluation does not focus on how the programme impacts on the EFA goals, due to the challenge in assessing the causality between the programme’s goals and the EFA indicators. The focus of the assessment is on whether the right conditions at the systemic and institutional levels are created to have an impact on these EFA macro-indicators. 
Asia-Pacific Education 2030: SDG 4 Midterm Review Year of publication: 2024 Corporate author: UNESCO Bngkok | UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) This publication marks the conclusion of the collaborative national midterm reviews of SDG 4 achievement in the Asia-Pacific. More importantly, it represents the beginning of the final sprint to the 2030 finish line. It also serves as a comprehensive analytical and policymaking tool for all stakeholders in the region to reflect and be better prepared for the second half of the journey. At the midway point of implementing the Education 2030 Agenda, we are observing both challenges and progress in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) in the Asia-Pacific. The region, overall, has made advances in reaching the globally and regionally most important targets under SDG 4, yet it is still far from delivering the common commitment of the Education 2030 Agenda, to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. Eight years into implementation, the Asia-Pacific has shown progress, especially in improving access to lower levels of basic education, as well as expanding early childhood education (ECE). Across most subregions of Asia and the Pacific, over 95% of primary school students complete primary education within the expected timeframe, while more than 80% of children one year before the official primary entry age are enrolled in organized early childhood education. However, participation in education is only one part of the puzzle, and the quality of learning, evidenced by limited data for the Asia-Pacific region on learning outcomes, remains concerning. More than half of students in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia do not reach the minimum proficiency level in mathematics at the end of lower secondary education. Overall and from a regional perspective, with priorities having accelerated in ECE, primary education reaching universal participation, and higher education being consistently regarded as prestigious to accomplish, secondary education is currently the weakest link apart from the chronically undervalued technical vocational education and training path. Fulfilling our commitment to the Education 2030 Agenda and leaving no one behind is not an easy endeavour and we need everyone on board in this unprecedented, yet necessary feat. This publication is meant to facilitate taking stock of the current situation and accelerate focused advances on the most relevant education topics for the Asia-Pacific region.