Adopted in 2015 as an integral aspect of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and it set of 17 transformative goals, Goal 4 aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Progress on Goal 4 is guided by ten specific targets that focus on a wide variety of education issues, including equity and access, skills development, universal literacy and numeracy, facilities, teachers, and financing. In spite of progress made over the past decades, the international community is falling behind on its commitments. Indeed, the world is experiencing a deepening global education crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left hundreds of millions of children and young people deprived of their right to quality education.
There is an urgent need to recover learning losses, reignite international political and financial commitment to education as a global public good and to accelerate progress towards realizing SDG 4. But there is an equally urgent need for collective reflection on how education systems can evolve to accompany and support the transformation of societies by 2030.
