The $5b question: Can we track the money, children?

Nigeria’s participation in the Global Partnership for Education’s campaign to mobilise $5 billion for education is an important opportunity for a country that continues to face significant challenges in access, learning outcomes and education financing. At the UN General Assembly in New York, Vice President Kashim Shettima described education as an investment in Nigeria’s economic future and highlighted the government’s partnership with the World Bank and GPE through HOPE-EDU, which is expected to reach approximately 29 million children and 500,000 teachers. Italy has also pledged €50 million to GPE programmes and interventions, while governments and other partners made commitments towards educating hundreds of millions of children globally.

These are substantial commitments but for Nigeria, I believe the more important question begins after the pledges are made: how do we know where the money goes, who it reaches and what changes because of it?

Nigeria has implemented numerous education interventions over the years, often with ambitious national targets. The challenge has frequently been the distance between what is captured in a programme report and what is happening to an individual child in a community. We can know how many schools were reached without necessarily knowing which children remain outside those schools, who dropped out, who returned and who is still at risk of leaving.

I am of the school of thought that education financing should increasingly be connected to a system that can track the education journey of children at the level where interventions are actually delivered. If a programme is intended to improve girls’ retention, for example, the government should be able to identify the girls at risk, understand the reasons they are leaving and track whether the intervention brought them back and kept them in school. If money is allocated for teachers, infrastructure or learning materials, there should similarly be a mechanism for tracking where the investment went and whether it produced the intended result.

This is particularly important for girls who are already at the margins of the education system. Malala Yousafzai, speaking at the UNGA event, called for greater commitment to gender equality in education and attention to the specific needs of girls in developing countries. That message is particularly relevant to Nigeria, where millions of children remain vulnerable to exclusion for different economic, social and geographic reasons. The next generation of education financing therefore needs more than financial controls. It needs education intelligence.

Nigeria should be building systems that allow the government to see, as close to real time as possible, where children are within the education system. Who is enrolled? Who is absent? Who has dropped out? Who has returned? Which schools are struggling? Which communities have the greatest gaps? What intervention has been provided, and what happened afterwards?

This is where technologies such as a Transition Early Warning System can become useful. A system that identifies children at risk of leaving school and tracks their progress after intervention creates a much clearer picture of whether education investments are actually reaching the children they were designed for. The same architecture can support a broader accountability framework in which programme funding, implementation and outcomes can be viewed together. For a country expecting to benefit from major international and domestic education financing, this should become part of the implementation architecture, not an additional reporting exercise at the end of a project.

The principle is simple: every naira invested in education should have a traceable pathway to an outcome, and every child should have a visible pathway through the education system.

This will require federal and state governments, development partners and implementing organisations to agree on common data standards, strengthen local education information systems and give communities a role in verifying what is happening in their schools. Parents, teachers and school leaders should not simply be recipients of programmes; they should form part of the feedback and accountability system.

The GPE financing campaign gives Nigeria an opportunity to demonstrate what this can look like at scale. We should welcome the resources, but we should also build the systems that allow Nigerians to follow those resources from the budget to the school, and from the school to the child.

The real measure of these investments will not be the size of the international pledge announced in New York. It will be whether, years from now, we can identify the children who were reached, the children who were missed, understand why they were missed and have the data needed to act. If we are serious about leaving no child behind, we must first build an education system capable of knowing where every child is.

• Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi, CEO of Do Take Action, is an independent consultant on edtech, climate change, public policy, and women’s procurement empowerment