{"id":1428,"date":"2018-09-30T18:31:02","date_gmt":"2018-09-30T18:31:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2018-09-30T18:31:02","modified_gmt":"2018-09-30T18:31:02","slug":"education-can-change-the-world-call-on-finance-ministers-to-increase-funding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/2018\/09\/30\/education-can-change-the-world-call-on-finance-ministers-to-increase-funding\/","title":{"rendered":"Education Can Change the World: Call on Finance Ministers to Increase Funding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Nelson Mandela famously said that \u201ceducation is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0But without enough funding, proper planning, and accountability, education systems become weak and ineffective \u2014 and too often, it\u2019s girls who pay the price.<\/p>\n<p>Why? Educated children, especially girls, are more likely to earn more as adults, and to raise healthy, educated children. Yet there are still many barriers to keeping girls in school. Growing up in rural Kenya,\u00a0<a class=\" \" href=\"https:\/\/www.globalcitizen.org\/en\/content\/vivian-onano-youth-advocate-profile-girls-educatio\/\">Vivian Onano<\/a>\u00a0witnessed many of these barriers, like child marriage and poverty. Chosen to attend a boarding school for talented girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, she is now an activist working to give more girls across Africa the opportunities she had.<\/p>\n<p>But not all girls are so lucky. In Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Sierra Leone, the education budget is very low \u2014 as low as 2%. These countries also have some of the worst educational results in Africa and, according to the Incheon Declaration, need to move towards spending 15% to 20% of their national budgets on education \u2014 approaching 10% as a minimum in the next two years. For example, Vivian\u2019s country, Kenya, has seen the benefit of increasing its budget to 6% for education, matched by well-targeted investment, to get more girls into the classroom and secondary school. We want to see them continue this trend.<\/p>\n<p>However, we know it\u2019s not just more funds that make a difference \u2014 it has to be spent in the right way. But many governments often waste or do not report what their education funds are being spent on, meaning that allocated funding is wasted, misspent, or disappears through corruption. Accountability and transparency are critical to measure the outcomes and monitor progress of interventions and investment to ensure maximum \u201cbang for buck\u201d. Ultimately, it is girls like Vivian \u2014 future leaders \u2014 who will suffer if systems across Africa are not well-funded, transparent, and responsive to need.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Help girls like Vivian change the world: Tweet at finance and education ministers for Nigeria, Kenya, South Sudan, and Sierra Leone, asking them to increase domestic funding for education.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<span class=\"et_bloom_bottom_trigger\"><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nelson Mandela famously said that \u201ceducation is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.\u201d\u00a0But without enough funding, proper planning, and accountability, education systems become weak and ineffective \u2014 and too often, it\u2019s girls who pay the price. Why? Educated children, especially girls, are more likely to earn more as adults, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1429,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1430,"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions\/1430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designerofreality.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}