On a cold day in February 2016 world leaders met in London and promised a school place for every single Syrian refugee child in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey for the new school year starting that September.



Governments pledged more money that day at the Syria and the region pledging conference than at any other one-day humanitarian event in history – £12bn in total.



One year later, around half of all Syrian refugee children are being given an education – and a future. That day in February was life-changing for half the refugee children who are now in school. However, the other half are yet to set foot in a classroom. That’s 800,000 children unable to see any future beyond a temporary shelter in a foreign country.

So which governments haven’t paid up?

The hosts of the London summit are claiming that broad pledges made in London are being kept, but when you scratch beneath the surface you find that less than a third of the money needed for education has been delivered.

A recent piece of research published by Theirworld showed that each government can tell you how much they are doing individually, but none of them will take a shred of responsibility for the overall promise they made.



If you examine the published reports around $400m of the $1.4bn needed for education in 2016-17 has been “committed” by donors. But it is impossible to know from reading these whether the funding has yet been disbursed on the ground, nor is there any information on what funding will be made available for the rest of this academic year in 2017 or the next, let alone where the missing billion dollars will come from.

This is a nightmare for the governments coping with the influx of refugees. Lebanon’s government has introduced an innovative system of double shift schools to accommodate all Syrian refugee children, but they need international funding to support this. This year 330 schools have stepped forward to run two school shifts a day. However, as they do not know much money is available to pay the teachers and to keep the school running for an extra shift, at the start of the school year in September they could not tell the children whether they would all be going back to school this academic year.

All the governments involved in the conference talk about accountability and transparency and call on civil society to hold them to account for their promises, but they are not allowing any level of real transparency for these actors to hold them to account. There is a woeful lack of information available. A review of the progress made on these commitments held at the UN General Assembly in September started with a simple question: how much has been delivered? This led to an embarrassing public disagreement between the panelists live on stage, one saying 80% and the other saying 43%. The then education minister for Lebanon Elias Bou Saab stood up and cut through the lack of clarity by saying “I’m opening schools without having funding for them. We are in a crisis”.

A progress report shared by Unicef at the event had no data on funding despite their attempts to get hold of the information. A further report was then quietly shared online in November with barely a reference to the education promise. In light of the lack of information I travelled to the region last year with Kevin Watkins, then the executive director of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), and we asked all the key organisations how much funding they had received and how much they knew was in the pipeline. We found a funding gap of $1bn of the $1.4bn needed, and this was a conservative estimate.

How to deal with smoke and mirrors

As campaigners we must continue to demand action and NGOs and donors should not be afraid to tell some straightforward home-truths. We know that parents will go to drastic lengths to get their children an education. Families risking death trips across the Mediterranean, for example, cite their children’s education as the primary reason to travel.

This is not the first time governments have pledged money to save the world and then not paid up. In 2009 at the COP15 summit, wealthy nations also promised to provide developing countries with $30bn by the end of 2012 to fight climate change. Research published in November 2012 showed $23.6bn had been paid up. Then there’s Haiti. $4.5bn was promised by UN member states for post-earthquake reconstruction projects in 2010-2011 at the 2010 International Donors’ Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti (remember that one?). Two years later, 53% of the money pledged was in the bank.

So where do we begin to tackle this problem? The first step to holding world leaders accountable is for the public to know when promises have not been met. This requires a free flow of information, with governments being required to report regularly when targets are being met or not met. This is not new – the Education Commission recommended back in September that the UNGA should set up an annual report to the UN secretary-general and security council on who is keeping their aid pledges. The governments of Britain, Norway, Kuwait and Germany also made a commitment at the London summit to ensure that financial pledges were honoured promptly so they should now put a motion to the UN demanding people pay up for education. They could also put forward a resolution to EU colleagues or raise the matter at the World Bank. This would show real leadership.

Campaigners, NGOs and civil society groups also need to be more cautious about simply welcoming announcements that lack concrete plans or any delivery dates. The challenge for NGOs is that they always want a “good news” story to tell their supporters so it’s not in their interest to sound negative when announcements are made. But ultimately ensuring delivery on the ground to the last mile is the most important part of advocacy.

It’s not too late to fulfil the promise we made to more than 1.5 million children to get them in to school – but to keep this promise, we need to challenge the governments who haven’t committed funding to education to do so now.

Ben Hewitt is director of campaigns at Theirworld.

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