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IdeasLAB Think Piece | By Leonora Dowley and Laura Savage, International Education Funders Group (IEFG)
Ask any philanthropic actor invested in improving education outcomes worldwide about the biggest hurdles to achieving SDG4, and they will name the sector’s fragmentation as one of their greatest barriers. Despite shared goals and available resources, the global education community has yet to function as one.
At the International Education Funders Group (IEFG), to our knowledge the largest global network of education philanthropy organisations1, we often talk about a spectrum of behaviours: from community to cooperation to coordination to collaboration. We define collaboration not as a process but as a mindset and practice that we believe is necessary to meet the scale and complexity of the education challenges ahead, because achieving the most basic SDG4 targets will require a deep shift in how we, and other philanthropic actors, work.
Our provocation in this think piece is simple but fundamental: we are far from our aspiration of collaboration as an overarching education community. Our question, reflecting on the future of international cooperation, is: In the current status quo, are philanthropic actors, governments, and multilateral organizations able to be part of the same community of education actors?
1 The IEFG consists of 100+ philanthropic organisations that are diverse across their thematic foci, geography and grant-making approaches.
International cooperation for education today is fragmented and under-resourced for the complexity it faces, and even more so for the things to come. It will need actors who can work within this complexity.
Does the global education community share a clear, common mission above the sub-sector goals that we each stand for? Can philanthropic actors align our incentives and actions into a clear, sequenced map of support for governments and decision-makers within education systems? Can we focus more on what binds us in purpose than what separates us by structure, ideology, or funding focus? These are not abstract questions, as they go to the heart of what international cooperation for education needs to become.
Our view is that international cooperation for education today is fragmented and under-resourced for the complexity it faces, and even more so for the things to come. It will need actors who can work within this complexity: who understand both government diplomacy and the world of private capital; and who recognise how power, policy and funding interact differently across regions. It will need institutions that can navigate a global agenda but act with local sensitivity and accountability to different local priorities. Across the philanthropic sector, some actors are already trying to live that future by working across diplomacy, private capital, and local accountability at once. This think piece draws on that experience.
International cooperation will be – inevitably – more plural
Philanthropy is not new to international cooperation. From the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations’ influence on development thinking in the mid-twentieth century, to the Gates Foundation’s entry into global health and education, private actors have long shaped — and at times disrupted — the international aid architecture. When the Global Partnership for Education formally opened its Board to private foundations and the private sector, it marked an acknowledgement that philanthropic and private actors had a seat at the table alongside governments and multilateral organizations. Yet this growing presence has not always translated into greater coherence. If anything, the influx of new actors may have even deepened the fragmentation that the system was already struggling to manage.
Nick Burnett’s critiques of the education aid architecture argued that the global system for education development has become fragmented and overly procedural, failing to adapt to changing geopolitical and financial realities (Burnett, 2018; Burnett, 2020). Institutions designed to coordinate donor efforts are struggling with new funding and ideas now circulating through different channels, including private investment and philanthropy. Burnett called for greater pluralism: a system that values learning and connection over control, and that places countries at the centre of decision-making. However, this raises an uncomfortable question for philanthropy. Are funders genuinely willing to listen and cede control, despite their own institutional incentives?
International cooperation must bring coherence around education goals
The global education community understands far more about improving learning today than a decade ago. We know that effective education systems align actors around a central goal, establish feedback loops that reinforce accountability, and cultivate teacher quality and instructional time (Silberstein, Spivack, and Crouch, 2021).
Philanthropy’s role is not to set the agenda but to strengthen the conditions under which governments can pursue their own — developing local leadership and institutional capacity, supporting effective teaching, early literacy and numeracy, and ensuring that innovation at the project level feeds into system-level learning.
Yet the conditions under which this knowledge must be applied are becoming more constrained, not less. In the future, there will likely be less money from traditional donors, less pooled through multilateral agencies, and fewer strong institutions to hold it all together. Ministers of Education will continue to negotiate for their share of national budgets and will still face tight fiscal ceilings and debt constraints shaped by global conditions.
In this environment, coordination will be harder and less centralised. This need not mean less effective. The challenge now is coherence of action around government-led priorities. Philanthropy’s role is not to set the agenda but to strengthen the conditions under which governments can pursue their own — developing local leadership and institutional capacity, supporting effective teaching, early literacy and numeracy, and ensuring that innovation at the project level feeds into system-level learning. We do not lack the evidence for what works. We lack assurance that philanthropic actors can align behind government leadership coherently enough so that we can make a difference at scale.
Network governance offers a path to managing pluralism and achieving goal coherence
The traditional aid model relied on a small number of donors and institutions whose coordination could be managed through global compacts. That world no longer exists. Bilateral donors are constrained, pooled funds like GPE face political pressure, and many governments manage heavy debt and limited fiscal space.
Meanwhile, philanthropy and private capital are emerging as significant actors not only for their funding (which remains small, relative to aid, let alone government spending) but also for their influence, which, depending on perspective, can be viewed as either catalytic or contentious due to the various possible philanthropic motivations, from social purpose to market creation. Either way, their presence has been reshaping the ecosystem.
This expansion of actors in the international system is not necessarily a weakness. Evidence from network governance research suggests that distributed systems can outperform hierarchical ones when they build accountability through transparency and learning rather than command. The challenge is to channel diversity into shared practice, ensuring that experimentation strengthens public systems rather than fragments them.
Networks can be adaptive systems when they function through relationships and reciprocity rather than authority, allowing for diversity while maintaining cohesion when guided by a common purpose.
Philanthropies can benefit from contributing to a fluid network of actors bonded by trust, shared evidence, and mutual accountability.
We see a microcosm of this system within IEFG. The very purpose of its network is to enable learning and connection, and our members are actively working to achieve ‘more than the sum of our parts’ impact for education. Some philanthropic organisations hold positions on global governance boards such as the Global Partnership for Education or UNESCO’s SDG4 High-Level Steering Committee. Others work locally, through partnerships with grassroots organisations or domestic ministries (and might, on occasion, question the relevance of international cooperation to them). Some philanthropies engage in dedicated peer-learning fora to share knowledge on working with global aid actors; others lead by example in shifting power to local partners; some forge strategic alliances with governments and civil society in specific countries; others build connections across the corporate and social investment worlds.
Overwhelmingly, philanthropies can benefit from contributing to a fluid network of actors bonded by trust, shared evidence, and mutual accountability.
READ MORE: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/imagining-meaningful-cooperation-philanthropic-perspective?hub=701
