Call for Contributions: NSI 12 on Innovative Financing for Education: Potentials, Challenges and Learnings
Call for Contribution
NSI 12: Innovative Financing for Education: Potentials, Challenges and Learnings
Guest Editors: Arushi Terway and Archana Mehendale
Context
NORRAG, the Global Education Centre of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, invites contributions to a NORRAG Special Issue (NSI) on
Innovative Financing for Education: Potentials, Challenges and Learnings
We invite submissions for short written articles (typically around 1200-1500 words) that can speak to a wider global audience of policymakers, academics, researchers, civil society organisations, and other actors working in education. We welcome abstracts and articles in any UN language, and will arrange translation into the language of publication (English, in this case).
We seek a good balance of articles from diverse contributors, perspectives and regions. As a first step, please indicate your interest by sending a short abstract (up to 250 words) by 4 April 2025. We will advise authors by 2 May 2025 whether or not to submit a full manuscript. The drafts of the full manuscripts are due by 30 May 2025. Papers will then be reviewed with feedback provided by 20 June 2025. Revised manuscripts are due by 14 July 2025 to meet the goal of publishing this NSI by December 2025. We also plan to organise hybrid and in-person events and communications highlighting contributions to this NSI at numerous venues after the issue is published.
About NSI 12: Innovative Financing for Education: Potentials, Challenges and Learnings
Despite long-standing commitments, education financing has remained insufficient, hindering many countries—especially in the Global South—from reaching crucial national development goals and international targets established in the Education for All (EFA) goals, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and most recently, Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4). Education is a human right and is often viewed as a public good, placing the primary responsibility for its funding on governments. Unfortunately, public funding has fallen short of fulfilling global educational requirements. Education Finance Watch (2024) highlights that, although government education funding as a percentage of national income has risen in low-income countries, it dropped in countries across all other income levels between 2010 and 2022. While overall education spending from governments, households, and donors has grown over the past decade, it is still insufficient to tackle the global learning crisis or to achieve SDG 4 within the next five years. This ongoing deficit has led governments and international organisations to seek out alternative funding strategies, including innovative financing mechanisms.
Over the past decade, innovative financing has been widely promoted as a potential solution to the persistent funding gap in education, particularly in fulfilling national and global commitments to universal, equitable, and quality education. Momentum for innovative financing grew following the Monterrey Consensus (2002), which underscored the need for alternative financing mechanisms to complement traditional development aid (and national government and household expenditure). Early efforts, such as Debt Swaps for education—implemented in Argentina, El Salvador, and Cameroon—allowed for funds to be redirected toward education but remained limited in scale. The launch of the Educate Girls Development Impact Bond (2014) started the momentum toward results-based financing. These initiatives established the foundations of a growing ecosystem of mechanisms aimed at mobilising new resources and improving the effective and efficient use of existing resources.
Thus, innovative financing for education (IFE) has emerged as a set of mechanisms that seek to mobilise additional financial resources from new actors or to improve cost efficiency. First, additional funds are sought from new sources, including private investors, new philanthropies, and multilateral organisations as well as through new instruments like education-focused taxes and levies. Secondly, innovative financing approaches aim to improve cost-effectiveness and efficiency in education service delivery, e.g. through results-based financing or public-private partnerships. A common characteristic among many of these approaches is their reliance on New Public Management (NPM) principles, which apply private-sector management techniques—such as performance-based contracts, the rhetoric of market competition, and measurement of outcomes—to education financing.
However, not all innovative financing mechanisms are designed, financed and deployed by private sector actors. Many so-called private investments also involve a significant element of public financing, where government or donor funds are used to pay for outcomes or guarantee loan repayments, or “blended” with private finance either at the set-up or outcome payment stages, or indeed to minimise the risk to the private sector investor. In this way, many debt swaps involve international public finance from donor governments. Equally, some national and regional governments are experimenting with innovative mechanisms using public education budgets. Notable examples include Brazil’s Bolsa Família, India’s education cess, Thailand’s Income Contingent and Allowance Loan System. These public innovative mechanisms also deserve research and policy attention.
In the past decade, there has been a proliferation of innovative financing mechanisms in the education sector, with some gaining significant traction while others remain at a conceptual stage. For instance, Impact Bonds (including Social and Development Impact Bonds) and Income-Linked Loans have been extensively documented, both in terms of implementation and critical evaluation. At the same time, other experimental financing mechanisms have been tested but not examined to the same extent, such as Social Impact Incentives (SIINCs), Impact-Linked Loans, Direct Beneficiary Transfers, Unconditional Cash Transfers and a Global Transaction Tax. These are but some examples among many others.
Nevertheless, while these mechanisms have been heralded as solutions, they have also faced critical scrutiny. Some scholars and practitioners argue that many IFE approaches fail to address the root causes of chronic underfunding in education, such as political choices that prioritise austerity in public expenditure, structural inequalities in global taxation and financial markets, and the under-commitment of international aid and domestic resources to education. Others have raised concerns about the potential privatisation of public education and the risks of shifting education financing towards profit-driven models that may further exacerbate structural inequalities, alongside the potential for privatising profit while publicising risk.
However, despite their increasing presence in global policy discussions and development aid decisions, many of these mechanisms lack rigorous empirical analysis regarding their actual effectiveness in mobilising additional financing, increasing cost efficiency of funds or improving the quality and equity of education outcomes. Key questions include :
- Do these mechanisms genuinely bring in more funding?
- Do they improve efficiency and effectiveness?
- Under what conditions?
- Who benefits most from these approaches?
This NORRAG Special Issue on Innovative Financing for Education aims to critically explore the evolving landscape of innovative financing in education by bringing together a diverse array of contributions from researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. The Guest Editors seek contributions that draw on firsthand experiences with and research pertaining to designing, implementing, managing, monitoring, and evaluating innovative financing mechanisms. The Guest Editors particularly seek perspectives from the Global South, ensuring that expertise from low- and middle-income countries—who are both the primary implementers and the communities most affected—is central to shaping the understanding and implementation of this burgeoning set of practices. Given the diversity of perspectives, variety of innovative financing mechanisms, and the range of actors involved, the Guest Editors would especially ensure that contributions adequately represent this heterogeneity. Through this collection, this NSI aims to offer a robust evidence base to inform future financing strategies in education and delineate useful research directions.
Call for Contributions
We invite researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and other education financing stakeholders to contribute to NORRAG Special Issue (NSI) 12, which will explore Innovative Financing for Education (IFE). This compendium aims to critically assess the diverse mechanisms, actors, and experiences shaping the field, examining both their potential and limitations in mobilising resources and improving educational outcomes.
Contributors are encouraged to draw from theoretical perspectives, empirical research, and policy and practice experiences to explore how IFE mechanisms have been designed, implemented, evaluated, and debated. We particularly welcome perspectives from the Global South, and contributions that offer first-hand insights from policymakers, implementers, and evaluators engaged in innovative financing projects.
When considering what is innovative in the financing approach, we encourage contributors to take a broad perspective and not limit themselves to mechanisms that have been “declared” to be innovative financing by the international development community. Contributors can make submissions on financing mechanisms (implemented or just conceptualised), with the following definition (NORRAG, 2020):
Innovative financing mechanisms are creative financing structures or arrangements that facilitate the movement of funds from sources that are interested in giving funds for a particular purpose to domains or sectors that need funds to carry on their activities. The aim of innovative financing, especially in education, is to:
- Raise additional funds from existing and new sources of funding
- Maximise efficiency and effectiveness of the available funds to reach the intended results.
We invite contributions that address but are not limited to the following:
- Conceptual and historical perspectives on IFE
- Theoretical underpinnings of IFE approaches
- Mapping the IFE ecosystem (mechanisms and actors)
- Case studies: Implementation and outcomes of IFE mechanisms
- Effectiveness and equity of IFE mechanisms
- Costing of IFE: gaining efficiencies or increasing transaction costs
- Critical perspectives: unpacking risks and limitations
- Learnings from innovative financing in other sectors or issues
- The future of IFE
Please send your 250 word abstracts to arushi.terway@graduateinstitute.ch and mehendalearchana@gmail.com
Guest Editors
Dr Arushi Terway, Thematic Lead: Private Sector Approaches, NORRAG (arushi.terway@graduateinstitute.ch)
Dr Archana Mehendale, Adjunct Professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India (mehendalearchana@gmail.com)
Submission of Abstracts and Full Manuscripts
Abstract (up to 250 words): 04 April 2025
Full Manuscript (1200-1500 words): 30 May 2025
Revised Manuscript: 14 July 2025
Projected Publication: December 2025
References:
World Bank, Global Education Monitoring Report, & UNESCO Institute for Statistics. (2024). Education finance watch 2024. World Bank. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099102824144527868/pdf/P50097819250a00ce1812018168df2deaa3.pdf
NORRAG (n.d.). Introduction to IFE. https://www.norrag.org/introduction-to-ife/