Opinion: To work toward world peace, invest in education

The world urgently needs to rebuild the foundations that can underpin lasting peace, and yet too often, one of the most crucial of these, education, is often relegated to an afterthought. To highlight this oversight, this year’s International Day of Education celebrated in January is dedicated to peace, recognizing that education is an essential pillar of peace and security. The past decade has been marked by lethal conflicts, crises, and wars. 2022 was the deadliest year since 1994 when genocide and wars wreaked havoc in Rwanda and the defunct Yugoslavia, killing more than 238,000 people. 2023 ended on a grim note with devastating wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine that are still grinding on today. Across the globe, wars keep taking countless lives, displacing millions of civilians from their homes and leaving many more in dire need of lifesaving aid. Much ink has been spilled on the disastrous impacts of conflict on education, but most of the research on the reciprocal relationship between peace and education has been sparse and outdated. To fill this essential knowledge gap and provide evidence to drive sound policies, we, the Global Partnership for Education, have partnered with the Institute for Economics and Peace to break down and better understand the relationship between education and peace. Unsurprisingly, our research confirms correlations between education and peace. What comes as a surprise is the extent to which education and peace are mutually reinforcing. Our report shows that countries with higher primary school completion rates are in general more peaceful. In addition, countries that enjoy high levels of peacefulness have secondary school completion rates of 99%. On the other hand, countries that suffer low levels of peacefulness have average secondary school completion rates of only 52%. Analysis of a range of education and peacefulness indicators showed that countries seeing improvements in education also enjoy more overall social and political stability overall, and that the opposite is also true: Countries with low educational levels tend to experience a higher occurrence and intensity of internal conflict. In other words, better performance in education tends to reduce the severity and duration of societal violence and save lives. More than any other education indicator, the duration and quality of schooling can be a powerful force to blunt the intensity of internal conflict and reduce the likelihood of future unrest. Last but not least, across the countries that our report examined, improvements in peacefulness also saw more investment in education. Countries that invest more in education have, on average, higher levels of peacefulness. For example, in 2020, Namibia, one of the most peaceful countries in Africa, had the sixth-highest rate of government investment in education as a percentage of GDP globally. Today, resources dedicated to education in middle- and lower-income countries have been dwindling as national budgets grapple with growing fiscal deficits and public debt in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical instability, and climate crisis. Since 2020, education budgets in nearly half of low-income countries have dropped by almost 14%. Just a 1% increase in external debt has been associated with nearly a 3% decrease in education spending. While cuts to education budgets may help relieve budgets in the short term, they are depriving economies of longer-term development. Moreover, there has been a drop in foreign aid to education. According to recent data by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, official development assistance to education dropped to under 10% of total aid in the first year of the pandemic from nearly 12% a decade earlier. And no rebound is in sight. Deprioritizing national budgets and foreign aid to education is a shortsighted choice that can only render sustainable development and peace more elusive. This year began with a dismal global outlook for peace, but we can restore hope by urgently investing more in education. Mounting evidence shows that education is a smart, mutually sustaining investment in prosperity and peace. We need to reverse the decline in resources to education while finding other ways, such as debt restructuring, to redirect funds to quality learning. This can allow us all, governments and donors, to live up to our collective responsibility of giving every girl and boy the opportunity to get the knowledge and skills they need to usher in a more peaceful and prosperous future.