Thank you very much.
Honourable chair and members of the standing committee, thank you very much for having us here today.
I'm here in my capacity as chair of the board of the Global Partnership for Education. I want to take a few minutes to tell you about the work of GPE, the Global Partnership, and how it fits into the broader landscape of international co-operation.
I will then turn to Dr. Karen Mundy, a Canadian, not an Australian, who is with me as chief technical officer, and who is going to outline some of the interim results of our new strategic plan. I'm looking forward to the discussion that will follow.
The Global Partnership for Education is the only multilateral partnership and funding mechanism exclusively dedicated to education in the world's poorest countries. Our partnership includes 65 developing country partners and over 20 donor countries, multilateral agencies, civil society, teachers, and the private sector.
Our work is dedicated to expanding inclusive, equitable, quality learning; to strengthening education systems; and to promoting government leadership and donor harmonization. We do this at the country level by locking together better sector planning, improved policy dialogue and mutual accountability, and offering results-based financing.
The Global Partnership supports research and analysis into the unique educational contexts of our partner countries. We then provide critical financing for the development and implementation of comprehensive education sector plans, plans that are endorsed by all partners.
GPE is also the largest financier of civil society advocacy in the education sector as part of our commitment to inclusive, evidence-based policy dialogue. GPE disburses approximately $500 million U.S. per year, with 50% of this going to fragile and conflict-affected countries.
We very much value our partnership with the Canadian government, which was one of the architects of our precursor, the fast-track initiative. Canada has been a core donor since 2002. We thank you for that.
Canada continues to play an active role on our board and technical committees, and has contributed $147 million to GPE to date, with another $45.5 million committed. I would also like to recognize and thank Canada for offering to host our June board meeting this year, the first one ever held in Canada.
Outcomes in education can have a dramatic impact on progress in achieving all of the sustainable development goals. According to UNESCO, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty if all students in low-income countries left school with basic reading skills. Investments in girls' education can reduce child marriage and maternal and infant mortality and increase the health and economic situation of families. We know that a child born to a mother who can read has a 50% greater chance of living past the age of five, a quite staggering statistic.
Despite the central importance of education as a human right and a driver of other rights, 121 million children and adolescents are out of school. Most of them are girls and children living in fragile and conflict-affected states. Seventy-five per cent of refugee youth are out of school.
A full cycle of education in a developing country costs $1.18 a day per child, yet global resources have fallen. Donor aid to basic education dropped by more than 14% between 2010 and 2014, even as development aid overall increased by 8%.
I have been proud to serve as a commissioner on the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. The recent commission report highlights that low-income countries receive less than a quarter of all education aid. These are the countries that are most in need, the countries where girls are most likely to be out of school, the countries where children are most likely to experience the effects of conflict and instability.
In order to realize the full potential of education to create a learning generation, the same education commission report shows that international financing must increase from $16 billion per year today to $89 billion per year by 2030.
We are at a pivotal moment for everything the Global Partnership for Education stands for and for what we can accomplish. I'm very optimistic. The past 18 months have been nothing short of a quantum shift towards the emergence of a new global consensus that education must take centre stage in the efforts of the world to achieve the sustainable development goals. This is education's moment, and GPE is poised to be one of the primary implementation agencies for SDG 4 to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
I would now like to invite Dr. Karen Mundy to discuss GPE's strategic plan and some of our key interim results.