Good afternoon and welcome.

And a special welcome to my Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown.

Thank you for joining us at the Transforming Education Summit today, to draw attention to the critical issue of innovative financing for education.

Our world is experiencing multiple crises, and governments, businesses and families everywhere are feeling the financial strain.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, two-thirds of countries have cut their education budgets.

But education is the building block for peaceful, prosperous, stable societies.

Reducing investment virtually guarantees more serious crises further down the line. 

We need to get more, not less, money into education systems.

Wealthy countries can increase funding from domestic sources.

But many developing countries are being hit by the cost-of-living crisis. They urgently need support for education.

That is the role of the International Finance Facility for Education.

This facility is aimed at getting financing to lower-middle-income countries – home to half the world’s children and youth – and to the majority of the world’s displaced and refugee children.

The Facility is not a new fund, but a mechanism to increase the resources available to multilateral banks to provide low-cost education finance. In time, we expect it to grow into a $10 billion facility to educate tomorrow’s generation of young people.

It will complement and work alongside existing tools, like the Global Partnership for Education, that provide grants and other assistance.

I congratulate Special Envoy Gordon Brown and all the countries and institutions involved in getting this facility off the ground.

And I urge all international donors and philanthropic organizations to back it.

Thank you.