Navigating the debt legacy of the pandemic
COVID-19 has left a legacy of record-high debt and shifted the trade-offs between benefits and costs of accumulating government debt. How do these trade-offs manifest themselves? And how does the current debt boom compare with previous episodes? We argue that the debt legacy of the pandemic is exceptional by historical standards in a way that warrants prompt policy action.
The pandemic’s debt legacy
The recent fiscal deterioration in advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) stands apart over the past half-century. Output collapses and government spending to keep economies afloat triggered a massive increase in global debt levels. In 2020, global government debt increased by 13 percentage points of GDP to a new record of 97 percent of GDP. In advanced economies, it was up by 16 percentage points to 120 percent of GDP and, in EMDEs, by 9 percentage points to 63 percent of GDP.
Even before the pandemic, the global economy experienced an unprecedented wave of debt accumulation that started in 2010—the largest, fastest, and most broad-based of four global debt waves since 1970. In EMDEs, the accompanying widening of fiscal deficits and the speed at which both government and private debt rose far exceeded changes in previous waves of debt.
This rapid increase in debt is a major cause for concern because of the risks associated with high debt. Previous waves of debt ended in widespread financial crises, such as the Latin American debt crises in the 1980s and the East Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s.
Trade-offs of debt accumulation
The pandemic has vividly illustrated the benefits of accumulating debt in the role of large fiscal support programs during the 2020 global recession. They were a critical policy response to avoid worse economic outcomes. They supported household incomes, kept businesses afloat, and helped stabilize financial markets.
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However, as the initial recovery from the pandemic gives way to a new normal, the balance of benefits and costs of debt accumulation is increasingly tilting toward costs. The costs of debt include interest payments, the possibility of debt distress, constraints that debt may impose on policy space and effectiveness, and the possible crowding out of private sector investment (Figure 1).
As the global economy strengthens, financial conditions are likely to tighten, whether because central banks begin to normalize monetary policy or because investors expect higher inflation. In EMDEs, this may be accompanied by depreciations that put pressure on debt sustainability in those countries with a large share of foreign currency-denominated debt. Even where foreign currency-denominated debt is limited, rising borrowing cost may erode debt sustainability, especially if growth fails to rebound strongly. Record-high EMDE debt makes countries vulnerable to financial market stress. Meanwhile, a recovery in domestic demand and closing output gaps may make additional fiscal stimulus unhelpful.
Ongoing debt booms
And many EMDEs are now particularly vulnerable to financial stress. More than two-thirds of EMDEs are currently experiencing debt booms. Their median government debt boom currently underway is similar in magnitude to, but has already lasted three years longer than, the median past debt boom (Figure 2). Current booms have been accompanied by a considerably larger fiscal deterioration than past booms (Figure 3). And booms currently underway have also been associated with slower output, investment, and consumption growth than in previous episodes.
Historically, about half of such booms in EMDEs were associated with financial crises either during the boom itself or in the two years after the end of the boom. Government debt booms associated with financial crises featured significantly weaker macroeconomic outcomes than booms without crises.
Low-income countries (LICs) are particularly at risk of debt distress, both because of high debt levels and because of a fragile composition of debt. In LICs, government debt rose by 7 percentage points, to 66 percent of GDP, in 2020. The composition of LIC debt has become increasingly non-concessional over the past decade as they have accessed capital markets and borrowed from non-Paris Club creditors. Since the end of April 2021, about one-half of LICs have been classified as being at high risk of debt distress or already in debt distress.
What to do?
National policymakers, as well as the global community, need to act urgently to address debt-related risks. Unfortunately, there is no easy policy fix that EMDE policymakers can implement to overcome these risks. For these economies, containing the potential risks associated with accumulating debt may mean resorting to alternatives for borrowing, including better spending and revenue policies, in an improved institutional environment. Spending can be shifted toward areas that lay the foundation for future growth, including education and health spending as well as climate-smart investment to strengthen economic resilience. Government revenue bases can be broadened by removing special exemptions and strengthening tax administrations. Business climates and institutions can be strengthened to support vibrant private sector growth that can yield productivity gains and expand the revenue base.
The global community can play a significant role in supporting a return to fiscal sustainability in EMDEs. In the near term, this includes supporting the vaccine rollout in these economies, where it has lagged and has weighed on the recovery. In the medium term, this includes fostering an open and rules-based trade and investment climate that has been a critical growth engine for many economies in the past. For some EMDEs, and LICs in particular, additional support may be needed to return debt to manageable levels, including debt relief.
Navigating the debt legacy of the pandemic
COVID-19 has left a legacy of record-high debt and shifted the trade-offs between benefits and costs of accumulating government debt. How do these trade-offs manifest themselves? And how does the current debt boom compare with previous episodes? We argue that the debt legacy of the pandemic is exceptional by historical standards in a way that warrants prompt policy action.
The pandemic’s debt legacy
The recent fiscal deterioration in advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) stands apart over the past half-century. Output collapses and government spending to keep economies afloat triggered a massive increase in global debt levels. In 2020, global government debt increased by 13 percentage points of GDP to a new record of 97 percent of GDP. In advanced economies, it was up by 16 percentage points to 120 percent of GDP and, in EMDEs, by 9 percentage points to 63 percent of GDP.
M. Ayhan Kose
Nonresident Senior Fellow – Global Economy and Development
Franziska Ohnsorge
Manager, Prospects Group – World Bank
Naotaka Sugawara
Senior Economist, Prospects Group – World Bank
Even before the pandemic, the global economy experienced an unprecedented wave of debt accumulation that started in 2010—the largest, fastest, and most broad-based of four global debt waves since 1970. In EMDEs, the accompanying widening of fiscal deficits and the speed at which both government and private debt rose far exceeded changes in previous waves of debt.
This rapid increase in debt is a major cause for concern because of the risks associated with high debt. Previous waves of debt ended in widespread financial crises, such as the Latin American debt crises in the 1980s and the East Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s.
Trade-offs of debt accumulation
The pandemic has vividly illustrated the benefits of accumulating debt in the role of large fiscal support programs during the 2020 global recession. They were a critical policy response to avoid worse economic outcomes. They supported household incomes, kept businesses afloat, and helped stabilize financial markets.
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However, as the initial recovery from the pandemic gives way to a new normal, the balance of benefits and costs of debt accumulation is increasingly tilting toward costs. The costs of debt include interest payments, the possibility of debt distress, constraints that debt may impose on policy space and effectiveness, and the possible crowding out of private sector investment (Figure 1).
As the global economy strengthens, financial conditions are likely to tighten, whether because central banks begin to normalize monetary policy or because investors expect higher inflation. In EMDEs, this may be accompanied by depreciations that put pressure on debt sustainability in those countries with a large share of foreign currency-denominated debt. Even where foreign currency-denominated debt is limited, rising borrowing cost may erode debt sustainability, especially if growth fails to rebound strongly. Record-high EMDE debt makes countries vulnerable to financial market stress. Meanwhile, a recovery in domestic demand and closing output gaps may make additional fiscal stimulus unhelpful.
Ongoing debt booms
And many EMDEs are now particularly vulnerable to financial stress. More than two-thirds of EMDEs are currently experiencing debt booms. Their median government debt boom currently underway is similar in magnitude to, but has already lasted three years longer than, the median past debt boom (Figure 2). Current booms have been accompanied by a considerably larger fiscal deterioration than past booms (Figure 3). And booms currently underway have also been associated with slower output, investment, and consumption growth than in previous episodes.
Historically, about half of such booms in EMDEs were associated with financial crises either during the boom itself or in the two years after the end of the boom. Government debt booms associated with financial crises featured significantly weaker macroeconomic outcomes than booms without crises.
Low-income countries (LICs) are particularly at risk of debt distress, both because of high debt levels and because of a fragile composition of debt. In LICs, government debt rose by 7 percentage points, to 66 percent of GDP, in 2020. The composition of LIC debt has become increasingly non-concessional over the past decade as they have accessed capital markets and borrowed from non-Paris Club creditors. Since the end of April 2021, about one-half of LICs have been classified as being at high risk of debt distress or already in debt distress.
What to do?
National policymakers, as well as the global community, need to act urgently to address debt-related risks. Unfortunately, there is no easy policy fix that EMDE policymakers can implement to overcome these risks. For these economies, containing the potential risks associated with accumulating debt may mean resorting to alternatives for borrowing, including better spending and revenue policies, in an improved institutional environment. Spending can be shifted toward areas that lay the foundation for future growth, including education and health spending as well as climate-smart investment to strengthen economic resilience. Government revenue bases can be broadened by removing special exemptions and strengthening tax administrations. Business climates and institutions can be strengthened to support vibrant private sector growth that can yield productivity gains and expand the revenue base.
The global community can play a significant role in supporting a return to fiscal sustainability in EMDEs. In the near term, this includes supporting the vaccine rollout in these economies, where it has lagged and has weighed on the recovery. In the medium term, this includes fostering an open and rules-based trade and investment climate that has been a critical growth engine for many economies in the past. For some EMDEs, and LICs in particular, additional support may be needed to return debt to manageable levels, including debt relief.
Renforcer les capacités en lecture et calcul des enfants en Côte d’Ivoire
Avant même que la COVID-19 ait laissé 1,6 milliard d’élèves non scolarisés au début de 2020, des millions d’enfants et de jeunes dans le monde n’avaient pas accès à l’éducation de qualité dont ils avaient besoin pour mener une vie saine, sure et productive. Pire encore, les enfants les plus pauvres et les plus marginalisés continuent d’être les plus touchés par cette crise de l’apprentissage, perdant ainsi leur droit à l’éducation. Cette situation est lourde de conséquences pour les générations à venir, notamment en termes de pauvreté, d’inégalités, de changement climatique et de santé publique.
Il est urgent d’agir pour élargir rapidement et durablement l’accès à des possibilités d’apprentissage de qualité pour tous les enfants. Bien entendu, la question est de savoir “comment?” S’il existe de nombreuses innovations qui améliorent l’apprentissage des enfants, la grande majorité ne touche qu’une petite fraction des enfants qui en ont besoin. Par conséquent, il existe une demande croissante pour plus de probations et de conseils sur la manière d’identifier, d’adapter et d’étendre des politiques et des pratiques rentables qui aboutiraient à l’apprentissage de millions d’enfants supplémentaires.
Laboratoire de Mise à l’Echelle en Temps Réel de la Côte d’Ivoire : Accompagner les efforts pour générer des changements durables et significatifs dans l’apprentissage fondamental des enfants
En réponse, le Centre pour l’Education Universelle (CEU) de Brookings a étudié les efforts visant à mettre à l’échelle et à soutenir les initiatives fondées sur des preuves et conduisant à des améliorations à grande échelle dans l’apprentissage des enfants. Le CEU a mis en oeuvre une série de Laboratoires de Mise à l’Echelle en Temps Réel (RTSL), en partenariat avec des institutions locales dans plusieurs pays, afin de produire des preuves et de fournir des recommandations pratiques autour du processus de mise à l’échelle dans l’éducation mondiale – encourageant un lien plus fort entre la recherche et la pratique. Ce rapport porte sur l’un des laboratoires de mise à l’échelle en Côte d’Ivoire – lancé en 2019 en collaboration avec le programme Transformer l’Education dans les Communautés du Cacao (TRECC) et le Ministère de l’Education Nationale et de l’Alphabétisation (MENA).
Il est articulé autour du processus de mise en oeuvre, d’adaptation et de mise à l’échelle du Programme d’Enseignement Ciblé (PEC), dirigé par le gouvernement, à travers une approche de rattrapage scolaire visant à améliorer la lecture et le calcul en début de scolarité et adapté de l’approche Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL). Bien que le laboratoire se soit concentré sur l’expérience du PEC à ce jour, ce programme sert d’étude de cas pour des questions plus larges sur la manière dont une initiative basée sur des preuves peut progresser vers une échelle nationale durable, avec des leçons qui sont transférables au-delà du PEC et de la Côte d’Ivoire.
La première section du rapport fournit un bref historique du cas, y compris une vue d’ensemble du Laboratoire de Mise à l’Echelle en Temps Réel et de l’écosystème de l’éducation en Côte d’Ivoire, ainsi qu’une brève description des principaux acteurs et initiatives engagés dans le PEC. La deuxième section détaille le parcours de la mise en oeuvre, de l’adaptation et de l’expansion du PEC en Côte d’Ivoire à ce jour, en explorant les facteurs critiques, les opportunités et les défis liés à sa conception, sa mise en oeuvre, son financement et son environnement favorable. La troisième section propose des leçons et des recommandations ciblées organisées autour de quatre thèmes clés qui sont apparus comme essentiels pour renforcer l’expansion continue du PEC, ainsi que pour informer les futurs efforts de mise à l’échelle de l’éducation en Côte d’Ivoire et au-delà.
Le parcours de passage à l’échelle du PEC: Une confluence de facteurs avantageux
A bien des égards, le PEC représente le « scénario idéal » pour le passage à l’échelle et la pérennisation d’une initiative au sein d’un système éducatif formel. Le PEC a bénéficié d’une confluence de facteurs en sa faveur – dont certains ont été orchestrés de manière stratégique et systématique, et d’autres ont émergé de manière fortuite. L’approche de TRECC axée sur les problèmes a favorisé le développement de l’adhésion du gouvernement au PEC dès le début et a contribué à sa forte appropriation par le gouvernement. La simplicité de l’approche, le fait qu’elle rejoint les príncipes théoriques que les enseignants apprennent au cours de leur formation initiale, son pilotage par la prestation directe du gouvernement, ses résultats convaincants et sa trajectoire précise pour la mise à l’échelle dans le système éducatif ont également favorisé l’engagement du gouvernement et facilité l’expansion du PEC.
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Les partenariats noués dans le cadre du modèle TRECC ont été d’autres facteurs importants pour susciter le soutien au PEC, notamment la possibilité d’expérimenter différentes solutions potentielles avant d’en retenir une, le rôle d’une tierce partie neutre évaluant les résultats des projets pilotes, le soutien technique d’organisations ayant initialement développé et étudié l’approche TaRL, et l’existence d’un laboratoire de mise à l’échelle réunissant diverses parties prenantes pour la réflexion et l’apprentissage par les pairs. Le PEC a également réussi à obtenir un soutien de haut niveau au sein du MENA, avec des personnes influentes qui le défendent. Ce soutien essentiel a été maintenu malgré les changements politiques et les changements dans l’environnement éducatif plus large, incluant une pandémie mondiale. Enfin, la disponibilité d’un financement pour le PEC au-delà de la phase pilote initiale – y compris un financement pour une adaptation et une expansion supplémentaires et un accès potentiel à un financement quinquennal par la création d’un fonds commun public-privé – a été essentielle pour que le PEC dépasse le stade de projet éphémère et devienne une approche que le gouvernement a l’intention d’étendre au sein du système.
Néanmoins, malgré les nombreux facteurs en sa faveur, l’expansion et le maintien du PEC en Côte d’Ivoire ne sont pas garantis et des défis critiques demeurent, notamment la capacité limitée du gouvernement à incorporer et à pourvoir le modèle dans les systèmes existants avec qualité, la persistance d’une mentalité de projet chez certains acteurs clés impliqués, et une attention insuffisante à l’engagement des parties prenantes de l’éducation au niveau local (y compris les enseignants et les communautés). D’autres contraintes potentielles à l’expansion future et au maintien du PEC incluent des retards dans le lancement du nouveau fonds commun et des difficultés à identifier et à garantir un financement national durable.
Les leçons à tirer pour renforcer l’expansion du PEC et informer les futurs efforts de mise à l’échelle
En accompagnant le parcours de mise à l’échelle de PEC, des leçons ont été tirées du cas centré autour de quatre thèmes clés qui ont été déterminants pour le succès de la mise à l’échelle de PEC à ce jour, et qui continueront à jouer un rôle essentiel dans les efforts futurs. Ces thèmes sont: 1) l’institutionnalisation comme voie vers une mise à l’échelle durable; 2) les partenariats et les champions; 3) les coûts et le financement; et 4) l’adaptation et l’apprentissage continu. Chacun de ces thèmes offre des leçons tirées du cas du PEC et des recommandations ciblées, non seulement pour soutenir les progrès en cours afin d’étendre et d’approfondir l’impact du PEC, mais aussi pour informer les efforts de mise à l’échelle d’autres initiatives d’éducation basées sur des preuves. Un bref aperçu de chacune des leçons est présenté ci-dessous, avec des recommandations ciblées pour les responsables de la mise en oeuvre, les décideurs politiques, les bailleurs de fonds et les chercheurs, lesquelles sont plus amplement détaillées dans le rapport complet.
1. L’institutionnalisation comme voie à la mise à l’échelle dans l’éducation
Assurer sans relâche dès le départ une concentration sur qui va livrer à grande échelle : Le pilotage d’une initiative avec le gouvernement demande plus de temps et de capacités au départ, mais il favorise également l’adhésion, détermine ce qui est faisable et démontre le potentiel de fonctionnement d’une solution dans le système.
Se concentrer sur la scalabilitéa d’une innovation dans le contexte local : S’il est tentant de rechercher des innovations qui bouleversent considérablement les méthodes de travail existantes ou qui testent des technologies de pointe, il est essentiel de se concentrer sur l’aspect pratique de la mise à l’échelle d’une innovation dans un contexte particulier, notamment sur la meilleure façon de l’intégrer durablement et équitablement dans les systèmes existants. Souvent, les innovations ayant le plus grand potentiel d’impact à grande échelle sont celles qui sont les plus faisables à supporter par le système.
Créer des structures de coordination dotées de capacités suffisantes et d’un mandat gouvernemental fort : Le passage à l’échelle par l’institutionnalisation nécessite une structure de coordination dotée d’un mandat de haut niveau pour prendre des décisions, harmoniser les efforts et s’assurer de l’avancement du travail de mise à l’échelle – en particulier lorsque l’institutionnalisation progresse au-delà de la description de poste
d’un individu ou d’un département.
Maintenir un pied sur l’accélérateur, et l’autre sur les freins : Même avec l’adhésion substantielle du gouvernement à la mise à l’échelle, il est important que toutes les parties prenantes comprennent la nécessité d’une approche à plus long terme et progressive de la mise à l’échelle, en mettant l’accent sur les questions de qualité et d’équité, et en équilibrant les compromis inévitables au cours du processus de la mise à l’échelle.
2. Partenariats et collaboration pour la mise à l’échelle dans l’éducation
Catalyser l’action collective, et repérer le point de rendement décroissant: L’engagement du gouvernement dans le processus de mise à l’échelle peut être essentiel pour étendre et soutenir une initiative d’éducation, mais une action collective est néanmoins nécessaire pour apporter des perspectives, des ressources, des expertises et des rôles différents. En même temps, une attention suffisante doit être accordée à la clarification de la motivation et des incitations de chaque partenaire, de la valeur ajoutée, de la vision de la mise à l’échelle et du succès, et de la tolérance au risque.
Soutenir les intermédiaires pour favoriser les partenariats et aligner les intérêts: Les organisations intermédiaires ou tierces – y compris les bailleurs de fonds – peuvent jouer un rôle essentiel de passerelle pour aligner des incitations disparates, développer des approches innovantes pour tirer parti des forces et perspectives uniques de chaque acteur, et rassembler les parties prenantes pour défendre un objectif commun.
Cultiver une ligue de champions de la mise à l’échelle: La création des conditions nécessaires à la diffusion de solutions efficaces requiert des champions de la mise à l’échelle à tous les niveaux au sein et en dehors du gouvernement, des salles de classe et des communautés, ainsi que la création délibérée d’un espace pour travailler ensemble différemment – appelé à perturber les modèles existants de collaboration et de prise de
décision. Le recours à une approche d’apprentissage collaborative, telle que le Laboratoire de Mise à l’Echelle en Temps Réel, est un moyen permettant de “rassembler les éléments du système dans la réunion” et à instaurer une nouvelle façon de travailler.
Soutenir un changement d’état d’esprit et de comportement pour la mise à l’échelle: L’identification et la mise en place d’un cadre de leaders et d’agents du changement pour la mise à l’échelle ne se limite pas à obtenir le soutien des parties prenantes pour la mise à l’échelle d’une initiative particulière: elles requièrent une sensibilisation aux principes clés de la mise à l’échelle, l’encouragement de l’application de ces principes par des actions concrètes et un changement de comportement, ainsi que le renforcement des compétences et des aptitudes nécessaires à la mise à l’échelle de l’impact.
3. Coûts et financement de la mise à l’échelle
Faire la lumière sur le financement public à long terme : Pour beaucoup d’innovateurs et de praticiens, les processus budgétaires et les filières du gouvernement restent opaques, et davantage de clarté est indispensable sur la méthode d’alignement ou d’intégration dans ces processus pour mobiliser des ressources à long terme pour une échelle durable.
Augmenter le soutien pour faire des projections de coûts solides à l’échelle: Il existe un besoin important de renforcer l’expertise et les capacités locales pour collecter, analyser et utiliser les données sur les coûts afin d’informer les projections à l’échelle. Des incitations sont nécessaires pour soutenir la collecte, l’analyse et le partage de ces données, et pour encourager une plus grande transparence et des opportunités d’apprentissage.
Tirer parti du potentiel du financement commun pour franchir la “vallée de la mort”: La collaboration des donateurs et le financement groupé peuvent fournir un financement relais important pour la mise à l’échelle, en aidant les initiatives à effectuer la difficile transition du stade pilote à la mise en oeuvre à grande échelle, mais il faut en apprendre davantage sur les avantages et les défis de ces mécanismes.
4. Adaptation et apprentissage collaboratif dans le processus de mise à l’échelle
Intégrer un processus d’apprentissage continu dans les systèmes gouvernementaux: L’intégration d’une approche d’apprentissage continu, telle que le Laboratoire de Mise à l’Echelle en Temps Réel, dans les systèmes gouvernementaux présente des avantages tangibles pour soutenir la mise en oeuvre, l’adaptation et la mise à l’échelle, avec des circuits de retours d’informations rapides et des possibilités de réflexion et de corrections de trajectoire. Le leadership gouvernemental d’un processus de type laboratoire peut conférer l’autorité nécessaire pour développer, tester et affiner une stratégie de mise à l’échelle avec les décideurs concernés.
Renforcer la capacité d’adaptation pour répondre à des environnements évoluant rapidement: Trop souvent, les adaptations testées dans le cadre du processus de mise à l’échelle ne sont pas systématiquement planifiées ou bien documentées, et l’apprentissage est perdu ; des approches plus systématiques pour planifier et tirer des enseignements des changements anticipés et spontanés sont nécessaires.
Investir du temps et des ressources dans l’apprentissage et l’échange entre pairs: De nombreuses initiatives en cours de mise à l’échelle travaillent de manière isolée et, malgré les différences contextuelles, peuvent bénéficier d’une plus grande collaboration pour partager leurs expériences, réfléchir aux défis et opportunités communs et résoudre les problèmes collectivement. L’apprentissage par les pairs doit aller au-delà d’occasions ponctuelles et doit être soutenu en tant qu’un aspect intrinsèque du travail qui bénéficie de suffisamment de temps, de capacités et de ressources.
Bien qu’elle n’en soit qu’à ses premiers chapitres, l’histoire du PEC est instructive à bien des égards. Plus que tout, le récit du PEC a mis en lumière les efforts inlassables et inspirants de tant de parties prenantes de l’éducation en Côte d’Ivoire qui s’efforcent d’améliorer les résultats de l’apprentissage pour les enfants, en particulier les plus vulnérables.
Et pourtant, le cas du PEC souligne également, que même avec ce scénario de scalabilité et d’opportunité « quasi idéal », l’augmentation de l’impact sur l’éducation reste une entreprise difficile et à long terme qui ne peut être considérée comme acquise. On peut dire que le PEC entre maintenant dans son chapitre le plus difficile, à savoir la phase intermédiaire delicate de la mise à l’échelle, car il dépasse le stade d’un projet pilote à petite échelle pour s’intégrer davantage dans les opérations gouvernementales et atteindre un nombre beaucoup plus important d’enfants.
Cette phase nécessitera une adaptation et une expérimentation continues, la collecte de données et leur utilisation dans des cycles d’apprentissage rapides afin de s’assurer que l’efficacité du PEC est maintenue à mesure qu’il se développe. Indépendamment de ce que l’avenir nous réserve, les efforts du gouvernement ivoirien pour mettre à l’échelle et soutenir le PEC – en partenariat avec divers acteurs – continueront à fournir de riches enseignements sur la mise à l’échelle et le changement systémique pour la Côte d’Ivoire et de nombreux pays dans le monde.
Télécharger le rapport complet ou les conclusions sommaires.
Credit photo: TaRL Africa
Improving children’s reading and math at large scale in Côte d’Ivoire
Even before COVID-19 left as many as 1.6 billion students out of school in early 2020, millions of children and youth around the world did not have access to the quality education they needed to lead healthy, safe, and productive lives. Even worse, the poorest and most marginalized children continue to be most affected by this learning crisis, losing out on their right to education. This situation has far-reaching consequences for generations to come, including on poverty, inequality, climate change, and public health. Urgent action must be taken to rapidly and sustainably expand access to high-quality learning opportunities for all children. Of course, the question is “how?” While there exist many innovations that improve children’s learning, the vast majority only reach a small fraction of children in need. As a result, there is growing demand for more evidence and guidance on how to identify, adapt, and scale cost-effective policy and practice that lead to millions more children learning.
In response, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings has been investigating efforts to scale and sustain evidence-based initiatives leading to large-scale improvements in children’s learning. CUE has been implementing a series of Real-time Scaling Labs (RTSL), in partnership with local institutions in several countries, to generate evidence and provide practical recommendations around the process of scaling in global education—encouraging a stronger link between research and practice.
This report focuses on one of the scaling labs in Côte d’Ivoire—launched in 2019 in collaboration with Transforming Education in Cocoa Communities (TRECC) and the Ministry of National Education and Literacy (MENA). It centers around the government-led process of implementing, adapting, and scaling the Programme d’Enseignement Ciblé (PEC), a remedial education approach to improving early grade reading and math adapted from Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL). While the lab has focused on the experience of PEC to date, it serves as a case study into larger questions of how an evidence-based initiative can achieve progress toward national sustainable scale, with lessons that are transferable beyond PEC and Côte d’Ivoire.
PEC’s scaling journey: A confluence of advantageous factors
In many ways, PEC represents the “ideal scenario” for scaling and sustaining an initiative within a formal education system. PEC benefitted from a confluence of factors in its favor—some of which have been strategically and systematically orchestrated, others which have serendipitously emerged. TRECC’s problem-driven approach supported the development of government buy-in for PEC from the beginning and contributed to strong government ownership. The simplicity of the approach, the fact that it resonates with theoretical principles that teachers learn during initial training, its pilot through direct government delivery, its convincing results, and its clear pathway for scaling in the education system also fostered government engagement and facilitated PEC’s expansion.
The story of PEC has highlighted the tireless and inspiring efforts of so many education stakeholders in Côte d’Ivoire striving to improve learning outcomes for children, especially the most vulnerable.
The partnerships forged in the TRECC model were other important factors in generating support for PEC, including the opportunity to experiment with different potential solutions before settling on one, the role of a neutral third-party assessing pilot results, technical support from organizations that originally developed and studied the TaRL approach, and the existence of a scaling lab bringing together diverse stakeholders for reflection and peer-learning. PEC has also had success in gaining senior-level support within MENA, with key influential individuals championing it. This critical support has been maintained despite political turnover and shifts in the broader education environment, including a global pandemic. Finally, the availability of financing for PEC beyond an initial pilot phase—including funding for additional adaptation and expansion and potential access to five years of financing through the creation of a public-private pooled fund—has been essential for moving PEC beyond a short-lived project to an approach that the government intends to scale within the system.
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Nonetheless, despite the many factors in its favor, scaling and sustaining PEC in Côte d’Ivoire is not guaranteed and critical challenges remain, including limited government capacity to incorporate and deliver the model in existing systems with quality, the persistence of a project mentality among some key actors involved, and insufficient attention to the engagement of education stakeholders at local levels (including teachers and communities). Other potential constraints to future expansion and sustaining of PEC include delays encumbering the launch of the new pooled fund and challenges around identifying and securing sustainable national financing.
Lessons to strengthen PEC’s expansion and inform future scaling efforts
Through accompanying the scaling journey of PEC, lessons emerged from the case centered around four key themes that were consequential to PEC’s scaling success to date, and which will continue to play a critical role in future efforts. These themes are: 1) institutionalization as a pathway to sustainable scale; 2) partnerships and champions; 3) costs and financing; and 4) adaptation and continuous learning. Each of these themes offers lessons from the case of PEC and targeted recommendations not only to support ongoing progress to expand and deepen the impact of PEC but also to inform scaling efforts of other evidence-based education initiatives. Below is a brief overview of each of the lessons with targeted recommendations for implementers, policymakers, funders, and researchers that are further detailed in the full report.
1. Institutionalization as a path to scaling in education
Ensure a relentless focus on who will deliver at large-scale from the start: Piloting an initiative with government takes more time and capacity up front, but also fosters buy-in, determines what is feasible, and demonstrates potential for a solution to work in the system.
Focus on the scalability of an innovation in the local context: While it is tempting to seek innovations that significantly disrupt existing ways of working or test cutting-edge technology, it is critical to focus on the practicality of scaling an innovation in a particular context, including how best to infuse it sustainably and equitably into existing systems. Often, the innovations with the most potential for large-scale impact are those that are most feasible for the system to bear.
Create coordinating structures with sufficient capacity and a strong government mandate: Scaling through institutionalization requires a coordinating structure with a high-level mandate to make decisions, harmonize efforts, and ensure the work of scaling moves forward—particularly once institutionalization progresses beyond any individual’s or department’s job description.
Maintain one foot on the gas, and one foot on the brakes: Even with significant government buy-in for scaling, it is important that all stakeholders understand the need for a longer-term, phased approach to scaling, with a laser focus on quality and equity issues, balancing inevitable trade-offs during the scaling process.
2. Partnerships and collaboration for scaling in education
Catalyze collective action, as well as recognize the point of diminishing returns: Government engagement in the scaling process may be critical for expanding and sustaining an education initiative, but collective action is nonetheless required to bring different perspectives, resources, expertise, and roles. At the same time, sufficient attention must be given to clarify each partner’s motivation and incentives, value addition, vision of scaling and success, and risk tolerance.
Support intermediaries to foster partnerships and align incentives: Intermediary or third-party organizations—including funders—can play a critical bridging role in scaling to align disparate incentives, develop innovative approaches to leverage the unique strengths and perspectives of each actor, and gather stakeholders together behind a shared goal.
Cultivate an alliance of scaling champions: Creating conditions for effective solutions to spread requires scaling champions at all levels within and outside government, classrooms, and communities, and deliberately creating space to work together differently—disrupting existing patterns of collaboration and decisionmaking. Leveraging a collaborative learning approach, such as the RTSL, can help to “bring the system into the room” and build a new way of working.
Support a mindset shift and behavior change for scaling: Identifying and building a cadre of scaling leaders and change agents requires more than getting these stakeholders to support scaling a particular initiative—it requires raising awareness of key scaling principles, encouraging application of these principles through concrete action and behavior change, and strengthening the competencies and skills needed to scale impact.
3. Costs and financing for scale
Shed light on long-term government financing: For many innovators and implementers, government budgetary processes and pipelines remain opaque, and more clarity is needed on how to align with or integrate into these processes to mobilize long-term resources for sustainable scale.
Increase support to make sound cost projections at scale: There is significant need to build local expertise and capacity to collect, analyze, and use cost data to inform scaling projections. Incentives are needed to support its collection, analysis, and sharing, and encourage greater transparency and opportunities for learning.
Leverage the potential of pooled financing to cross the “valley of death:” Donor collaboration and pooled funding can provide important bridge financing for scale, helping initiatives make the challenging transition from pilot to large-scale implementation, but more learning is needed on the benefits and challenges of these mechanisms.
4. Adaptation and collaborative learning in the process of scaling
Integrate a continuous learning process within government systems: There are tangible benefits to infusing a continuous learning approach, such as the RTSL, into government systems to support implementation, adaptation, and scaling, with quick feedback loops and opportunities for reflection and course corrections. Government leadership of a lab-like process can confer the necessary authority to develop, test, and refine a scaling strategy with relevant decisionmakers.
Strengthen adaptive capacity to respond to rapidly changing environments: Too often adaptations being tested in the scaling process are not systematically planned for or well documented, and the learning is lost; more systematic approaches to planning for and learning from anticipated and spontaneous changes are needed.
Invest time and resources in peer learning and exchange: Many initiatives in the process of scaling are working in isolation, and in spite of contextual differences, can benefit from greater collaboration to share experiences, reflect on common challenges and opportunities, and problem-solve collectively. Peer learning must go beyond one-off occasions and should be supported as an intrinsic aspect of the work that receives sufficient time, capacity, and resources.
Though still in its early chapters, PEC’s scaling story is instructive on many levels. More than anything, the story of PEC has highlighted the tireless and inspiring efforts of so many education stakeholders in Côte d’Ivoire striving to improve learning outcomes for children, especially the most vulnerable.
And yet the case of PEC also underscores that even with this almost “best case” scenario of scalability and opportunity, scaling impact in education remains a challenging and long-term endeavor that cannot be taken for granted. PEC is arguably now entering its most challenging chapter—navigating the tenuous middle phase of scaling—as it pushes beyond a small-scale pilot to become further embedded in government operations and reach significantly more children. This phase will require continued adaptation and experimentation, collecting data, and using them in rapid learning cycles to ensure PEC’s efficacy is sustained as it expands. Regardless of what the future holds, the Ivorian government’s efforts to scale and sustain PEC—in partnership with various actors—will continue to provide rich insights into scaling and system-wide change for Côte d’Ivoire and many countries around the world.
Read the full report or the summary findings (forthcoming).
Photo credit: TaRL Africa
Understanding child-friendly urban design
More than half of the world’s children are growing up in cities. By 2030, up to 60 percent of the world’s urban population will be under 18 years old. Yet, children and families are often invisible to urban planners, developers, and architects when creating city-wide policies that impact transportation, air and noise pollution, and health and well-being. “The truth is that the vast majority of urban planning decisions and projects take no account of their potential impact on children and make no effort to seek children’s views…All too often, this is down to a simple lack of respect for children’s rights or abilities,” writes Tim Gill in his recent book “Urban Playground.”
A critical component of child-friendly urban planning is prioritizing opportunities for learning and healthy development both in and out of school. This is especially important for children living in communities challenged by decades of discrimination and disinvestment. Deep inequalities plague the education systems in many countries, and the COVID-19 pandemic has widened existing educational equity in worrisome ways. In the U.S., persistent economic disparities among families lead to large differences in educational outcomes. Research shows that as early as age 3, children from lower-income households lag behind their more affluent peers in language and spatial skills.
To address both of these needs, cities around the world are beginning to invest in Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL)—installations and programming that promote children and families’ learning through play in the public realm. The climate for building on this momentum could not be more favorable, or the timing more urgent. In the wake of COVID-19, growing numbers of leaders understand the need to rethink neighborhood investments to enhance health, well-being, and economic opportunity—and to reexamine old views on how and where children develop the competencies and skills needed to thrive—and ask how to build on a community’s fund of knowledge to reduce inequities through culturally-informed spaces. In the U.S., these leaders have a once-in-a-generation chance to channel American Rescue Plan funds for innovations in child development and learning—while making cities more vibrant and inclusive.
As the PLL movement continues to grow, we need more expansive ways to measure its impacts, and to use that information both to improve PLL installations and to garner greater investment in them.
We know from existing installations that PLL is effective at enhancing STEM and literacy skills and increasing child-caregiver interaction in ways that build social and mental capitol. But as the PLL movement continues to grow, we need more expansive ways to measure its impacts, and to use that information both to improve PLL installations and to garner greater investment in them. This brief presents the first iteration of a new metrics framework city-level policymakers, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropies can use to help assess the positive effects of PLL on learning outcomes, as well as its potential to enhance social interaction and public life in revitalized spaces.
A new approach to child-friendly urban design: Playful Learning Landscapes
PLL is an emerging, interdisciplinary area of study and practice that reimagines the potential of cities as supportive ecosystems for children and families by marrying urban design and placemaking with the science of learning. The Brookings Institution, in collaboration with Temple University and the Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network (PLLAN), is building an interdisciplinary community of practice and responding to the growing interest of stakeholders and decisionmakers around the world to generate evidence and guidance for scaling the PLL approach.
PLL uses human-centered co-design to create learning opportunities in bus stops, parks, and supermarkets and other everyday places—transforming them into enriching, social spaces for children, families, and communities. What makes PLL unique is the critical element of playful learning—a spectrum of child-directed play methods that include free play (no direct adult involvement), guided play (supported by adults toward a learning goal), and games (rule-based activities with learning goals) informed by the latest findings in developmental science. Guided play—the focus of interactions in PLL—allows children to maintain agency during their play with the guidance of an adult to provide structure and focus the activity around a learning goal (e.g., a well-curated exhibit in a children’s museum).
Scaling playful learning in cities
A growing number of cities around the world—including Philadelphia, Chicago, Santa Ana, CA, London, Mumbai, and others—are embracing PLL to support children’s learning outcomes and promote urban renewal, but efforts to scale and sustain these interventions are nascent. To fully realize the potential benefits of PLL, cities need more than a handful of installations placed sporadically around the landscape. To get to scale, municipalities instead must start infusing playful learning principles and design elements into the mainstream practices of government, businesses, and other organizations.
To this end, last year we outlined the steps city-level decisionmakers and stakeholders must take to create rich playful learning environments. These include fostering better coordination among city agencies to support the integration of playful learning efforts into new and existing programs and projects, streamlining regulatory and other processes to make it easier for nonprofits and other groups to implement PLL installations and activities, and collaborating with national organizations that are supporting local efforts. Scaling also requires engaging with neighborhood residents as equal partners in all phases of a project to ensure that designs meet their needs and preferences and communicating the why and how of playful learning to expand its reach and impact.
Brookings now seeks to address key gaps in cities’ knowledge, networks, and capacity and inform strategies that integrate PLL into mainstream urban planning and placemaking—bringing it to scale.
For city leaders, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropy to put time and resources into expanding PLL, they need hard evidence that it works. This requires a framework that outlines the desired outcomes of PLL and a set of metrics for measuring whether or not those outcomes are achieved.
Measuring Playful Learning Landscapes outcomes
For city leaders, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropy to put time and resources into expanding PLL, they need hard evidence that it works. This requires a framework that outlines the desired outcomes of PLL and a set of metrics for measuring whether or not those outcomes are achieved. As Senior Fellow Jenny Perlman-Robinson wrote in a Brookings report on PLL in Philadelphia, “Without clarity about definitions of success or without clearly defined metrics for measuring outcomes, it will be challenging to motivate and inform change at large scale.” Moreover, more robust evaluation will help communities know if individual PLL sites are working as intended, which will inform improvements to current as well as future sites.
There is now ample evidence that PLL supports several learning goals. For example, existing research shows that PLL promotes the kinds of caregiver-child behaviors and interactions directly related to later progress in social, STEM and literacy skills. Aside from these learning outcomes, we also must build on what we know about the benefits of public space investments to better understand how PLL installations can help improve the public realm, provide new opportunities for social interaction, and contribute to community cohesion (Box 1).
To advance this knowledge, Brookings and its partners have developed a framework and an initial set of indicators from both learning science and placemaking perspectives to define success criteria. Our “Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework” will help evaluate the impact of pilot projects and guide iteration, scaling, and adaptation of PLL to future sites.
Box 1. Community engagement is critical for fostering PLL outcomes
The PLL metrics framework focuses on potential outcomes of playful learning spaces in the public realm. Philadelphia, Chicago, Santa Ana and other cities demonstrate that co-designing PLL prototypes with the community is required to reach these outcomes. For example, researchers worked closely with community members in Philadelphia to design and place the installations in Urban Thinkscape. Researchers also recruited and trained neighborhood members to be data collectors in response to requests from community members for more employment opportunities for neighborhood residents, and more ways to be involved in—and have greater ownership of—the process. In Santa Ana, researchers worked with mothers in the community to co-design signage that promotes caregiver-child interactions in the supermarket. Signs in the produce section with questions like, “How do you find the best fruit or vegetable?” and “What senses do you use to find the best one?” reflect stories that the mothers told about passed-down techniques for picking a ripe avocado or papaya. These signs promote sharing cultural traditions passed down from one generation to the next and encourage children to make observations and test hypotheses—both important skills for learning science later.
Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework
Our work to create a PLL metrics framework began with a landscape analysis to survey existing frameworks and tools around measurement and evaluation of playful learning in cities. To create goals and metrics from the child development perspective, we turned to the rich and growing body of research that demonstrates PLL increases caregivers’ attitudes about the connection between play and learning, promotes the kinds of caregiver-child communication that support relationship building and language learning, and encourages talk about numbers, letters, and spatial relations.
In addition, three placemaking and urban design frameworks inspired and helped shape our approach and selected metrics.
The Place Diagram (Project for Public Spaces (PPS)): Through their work evaluating public spaces across the world, PPS identified four qualities of successful public spaces: (1) The spaces are accessible; (2) people engage in a range of activities there; (3) the space has a positive image and is comfortable; and (4) it is sociable and welcoming. The framework also prompts the user to ask key questions in assessing each of the qualities. For example, asking “Do sidewalks lead to and from the adjacent areas?” or “Does the space function for people with special needs” to address accessibility.
KaBOOM! Play Everywhere: Understanding Impact (Gehl): To examine the impact of KaBOOM!’s Play Everywhere initiative—implemented across 50 U.S. cities—Gehl used a multimethod approach including on-site observations, interviews with stakeholders, and intercept and neighborhood surveys to understand who visits the sites, what they do when visiting, and how they feel about the sites. Through this work, Gehl identified four key components of a successful Play Everywhere project: (1) proximity to existing kid “hubs” (where families live and spend time); (2) incorporation of kids’ perspectives into the design and implementation process early and often; (3) prioritization of interactive designs that spark curiosity and imagination; and (4) messaging that it’s okay to play in many different spaces (e.g., at the bus stop or on the sidewalk).
Measuring the Civic Commons (Reimagining the Civic Commons): Reimagining the Civic Commons designed a measurement system to examine the impact of investments in public spaces and the surrounding communities towards four key goals: civic engagement, socioeconomic mixing, environmental sustainability, and value creation. Within each goal are “signals”—indicators associated with a project’s objectives, and each of those signals has a set of metrics designed to understand changes such as average hourly visitorship of the site, number of trees in civic commons sites, and percent of respondents who say they feel safe in the neighborhood.
While the resources described above were all instrumental in shaping the development of our metrics framework, we adopted the approach of mapping metrics to signals and the signals in turn to goals (inspired by the Measuring the Civic Commons framework) because it allowed us to integrate both the child development and placemaking perspectives of PLL into one framework (Box 2). Our metrics framework has the following five goals:
Promote healthy child development and learning: Sparks playful and meaningful experiences that support child-caregiver interactions known to promote cognitive and social-emotional learning and positive development.
Support an accessible and welcoming public realm: Offers a physical space that is easy and convenient to access, feels safe and inviting to visitors, and reflects community cultures and values.
Foster a vibrant and inclusive social environment: Cultivates an engaging public realm that promotes social interaction among children and adults of all incomes and backgrounds.
Nurture civic engagement and strong sense of community: Builds neighborhood pride and community cohesion through the cocreation and ongoing oversight of PLL sites.
Strengthen the economic health and resiliency of neighborhoods: Has a positive impact on the surrounding community, including local businesses, property owners, and residents.
Box 2. PLL metrics framework at a glance
Note: The full framework can be found here.
Challenges and next steps
The “Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework” is a key step toward generating data that are critical for scaling by helping to define the desired outcomes of playful learning in public and shared spaces, and importantly, how they are measured. But measuring the impact of public spaces isn’t easy—getting the metrics “right” is likely to be an ongoing effort, and data collection itself is often messy and time intensive. Our framework employs a range of qualitative methods including observation, intercept, and neighborhood surveys, each of which can be difficult to design and employ, especially in communities where trust in local government is low and residents may be wary of interacting with outsiders.
As the PLL movement gains momentum, generating evidence to demonstrate its impact will be key to strengthening the field and shifting mindsets among key stakeholders and city-level decisionmakers to weave playful learning into the fabric of city policies.
In the next phase of work, Brookings—together with its partners—will pilot the PLL metrics framework to explore research questions such as:
Are changes in caregiver and/or child attitudes and behaviors toward play and learning sustained after the initial exposure to PLL installations? In the future, we will want to measure the possible child development and learning effects that are prompted after visiting a PLL site (for example, at home or in other environments).
Do multiple PLL installations in the same neighborhood lead to broad-based impacts at various geographic scales? The current framework focuses on outcomes at the individual site level. As more installations are built across cities in the U.S. and globally, we hypothesize that PLL will yield more expansive neighborhood and community outcomes. Data from The Ultimate Block Party—the first PLL pilot—suggest that caregivers’ attitudes about the play-learning connection can be shaped in a community setting. These broader outcomes will be important to measure as a step toward sustainable uptake of PLL approaches.
What are the most effective methods for collecting data to maximize the quality of feedback? As described in Box 1, engaging community members to collect data can help in increasing response rates and improving the quality of feedback, but collecting survey data at PLL pilot sites will be challenging.
As the PLL movement gains momentum, generating evidence to demonstrate its impact will be key to strengthening the field and shifting mindsets among key stakeholders and city-level decisionmakers to weave playful learning into the fabric of city policies. The PLL metrics framework provides a roadmap to collect data that demonstrates PLL’s tremendous potential to narrow opportunity gaps while creating more livable and playful cities. The framework will continue to evolve as we learn from communities that are testing the expansion and adaptation of PLL on a neighborhood- and/or city-wide level. Rather than an end point, the framework provides a starting point for thinking about PLL’s goals and how to understand—and communicate—if and how sites are achieving them. This important work is just beginning.
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Leveraging the Biden-Harris climate agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals
In November, at the COP26 U.N. Climate Change Conference, the U.S. will join the community of nations keeping alive the promise to meet the agreed target to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. The Biden administration will continue to work to reestablish U.S. leadership and increase global commitments for tackling climate change amid lingering skepticism from other countries. Its strategy for achieving its own ambitious target goes beyond a narrow focus on mitigation to include other important dimensions such as quality jobs, public health, and environmental justice. This offers an opportunity to leverage the areas of intersection and synergy between the U.S. climate agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to advance U.S. climate ambitions, both at home and abroad.
The US at COP26: The Importance of Rebuilding Credibility and Driving Ambition
President Biden has made climate change a key priority of his administration. He reversed President Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Climate Accords on his first day in office, and hosted a global summit in April where he outlined a new, ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) for the U.S.—a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels of economywide net greenhouse gas pollution by 2030.
At the U.N.-sanctioned COP, nations come together as peers to present both individual and collective climate commitments and progress toward their targets. This year, advocates and markets will be closely watching areas such as the phasing out of coal, commitments regarding hard-to-abate industries such as cement and aviation, and increased financing. While President Biden hosted some of the largest countries at the April 2021 Summit, for the wider global community, U.S. participation in COP26 constitutes an important next step in its reentry to the fold.
The Biden administration has already built a formidable team and rolled out ambitious plans, led by first-ever White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy to advance its priorities at home and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry to rally the international community. The COP presents a major opportunity for the U.S. to reassert its leadership on the global stage. The administration will be eager to raise the collective global ambition, and it is likely to build on its April commitments with new initiatives. It may even roll out a climate action plan that demonstrates how the U.S. will meet its new domestic target.
Notwithstanding these ambitions, the U.S. is still working to rebuild credibility and trust on these issues. The administration will face skepticism about both its ability to advance its plans at home and the extent to which the U.S. will remain dependable beyond its term in office.
The US Climate Action Plan: More than Mitigation
The administration’s climate change agenda is also a core pillar of the president’s comprehensive Build Back Better plan. This policy agenda also seeks to respond to the inequalities unveiled during the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning unleashed by the murder of George Floyd. Informed by these objectives, its strategy to reach the newly ambitious target reflects an integrated approach, one that accelerates mitigation of greenhouse gases to achieve the 50 percent reduction by 2030 while also spurring an economic transformation that results in a fairer, healthier, and more just economy.
President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad (EO 14008) clearly lays out this integrated approach. Published just a week after taking office, it establishes a governmentwide National Climate Task Force comprised of Cabinet secretaries, with a mandate to “facilitate planning and implementation of key Federal actions to reduce climate pollution; increase resilience to the impacts of climate change; protect public health; conserve our lands, waters, oceans, and biodiversity; deliver environmental justice; and spur well-paying union jobs and economic growth.”
The SDGs: A Potential Force Multiplier
Such an integrated strategy mirrors the interdependent objectives reflected in the SDGs, to which the U.S. and all other U.N. member states agreed in 2015. A central component of the SDGs is that they are universal, meaning they apply domestically to all countries regardless of income level.
While the Biden administration has taken some steps to position its international development investments through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) within the context of the SDGs, it has not yet signaled an embrace of the SDGs related to its domestic agenda. Yet the harmony between the U.S. climate plan and the SDGs provides the administration with an additional entry point to rebuild U.S. credibility and generate additional political momentum for its ambitious and comprehensive climate agenda at COP26.
Similar to the administration’s climate agenda, the SDGs provide a ready-made framework that connects the dots between health, jobs, resilience, and justice. It also importantly helps to set targets for assessing progress and ensuring accountability. Action on climate change has its own goal (SDG 13) and, amid today’s changing environment, stands as an essential requirement for successful sustainable development. This framework for accountability is already recognized and being used around the world, including in specific cities and sectors in the United States.
Given that the SDGs represent a collective global effort, with an imperative for every country to make progress on human, economic, and environmental targets simultaneously, drawing connections between the U.S. climate plan and the SDGs could provide another concrete example of the administration’s seriousness about reentering and respecting multilateral alliances—and stake out a potential leadership position with humility, as it acknowledges the progress necessary within our own borders.
Specific Synergies between US Climate Actions and the SDGs
A key emphasis of the SDGs is to “leave no one behind,” ensuring that governments focus their policy attention on those who have been most marginalized or are most vulnerable. The president’s executive order quickly establishes this as a clear priority for its proposed actions on climate change.
Economic opportunities and new jobs (SDG 8) stemming from a sustainable economy and the economic recovery must benefit left-behind communities—“places that have suffered as a result of economic shifts and places that have suffered the most from persistent pollution, including low-income rural and urban communities, communities of color, and Native communities.” It also calls for greater job opportunities for women (SDG 5). This commitment is reinforced by multiple Build Back Better proposals under negotiation in the budget reconciliation process.
The executive order also strongly emphasizes the importance of advancing environmental justice. It establishes a White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council (WHEJAC) and calls for the creation of an environmental justice scorecard for federal agencies and initiatives. Its mandate of an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity and an interagency working group focused on reducing the risk of climate to vulnerable groups further advances this priority.
At the center of this effort, the Justice40 Initiative aims to ensure that 40 percent of the overall benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy flow to disadvantaged communities. It also calls for a new Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool to provide further guidance to federal departments and agencies.
These actions directly link to SDG targets related to public health, clean air, clean water, access to green space, gender equity, racial equity, and reductions in inequality. Presumably, both a scorecard and screening tool for environmental justice will depend upon disaggregation of demographic and geographic data, replicating the type of targets, indicators, and evidence base inherent in the SDGs. For example, Justice40 directly reflects the spirit of SDG target 10.1, which calls for progressively achieving sustained income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population at a rate higher than the national average.
The transition toward a sustainable economy will involve upgrading infrastructure, investing in clean energy, and supporting bold U.S. leadership on innovation while uplifting impacted mining and power plant communities. These objectives tie to targets under SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, Infrastructure), including target 9.4 (upgrade infrastructure and retrofit industries to make them sustainable). The Investment in Coal and Power Plant Communities plan aims to support small, medium, and rural manufacturers in the transition, to increase access to capital for domestic manufacturers, to guarantee union and bargaining rights for public service workers (PRO Act), and to ensure domestic workers receive the legal benefits and protections they deserve.
The administration seeks to produce clean and affordable energy that generates opportunities for job creation. The Initiative for Better Energy, Emissions, and Equity (E3) includes $30 million investment in the American workforce through technical assistance and funding awards by the Department of Energy (DOE), with the aim to save $750 per year in energy bills for nearly 12 million American households, and create nearly 700,000 quality jobs in every region in the country through the Clean Energy Accelerator. By aiming at energy efficiency and universal affordable access to clean, efficient energy, the initiative could be measured through the indicators of SDG 7 (Affordable & Clean Energy), including targets 7.1 (ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services) and 7.2 (increase substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix).
Beyond the Federal Government: Leveraging US Multistakeholder Leadership
The Biden administration would not be starting from a blank slate in more intentionally fusing the SDG and climate agendas domestically. Many U.S. cities, states, and corporations are already in the vanguard of combining climate action and the SDGs. City governments across the U.S. have begun to use the SDGs as an evidence-based framework for measuring progress and fostering policy coherence among different offices and levels of governance. They also embrace the SDGs as a valuable policy framework that is helping to mobilize progress on climate goals, integrating those ambitions with critical targets on inclusion, equity, and sustainability. Cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Phoenix—leaders in the climate and environmental agenda—have pioneered approaches to adapting the SDGs to their local realities.
Over the past five years, U.S. local leadership has also had a decidedly global flavor. Through city-to-city cooperation, networks, and policy exchanges globally, U.S. cities and states are pushing ambition and policy among their counterparts across the world. They have established their leadership in networks such as C40 Cities (chaired last year by Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles), ICLEI, the U.S. Climate Alliance, the Urban 20 (an affiliate of the G-20), the Local2030 Islands Network, and the Brookings SDG Leadership Cities network.
This activity helped maintain U.S. global leadership and cooperation during a notable federal absence. While the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, U.S. stakeholders remained committed, and many of them have become global examples of combined action on climate and sustainable development.
Hawaii helps host a Local 2030 Hub, providing leadership, facilitating peer exchange, and offering technical assistance with a network of small island developing states in the Pacific. New York City launched the first-ever Voluntary Local Review (VLR), an innovative report on local SDG progress that has emerged as a global movement, one so widespread that it was recognized by United Nations member states this year in the Ministerial Declaration of the High-Level Political Forum for the first time. Los Angeles initiated a local Green New Deal and committed to 100 percent renewables on its grid by 2025 while launching a network of cities dedicated to advancing gender equity. The Biden administration can benefit from the experience of these leaders in integrating the two agendas and leverage the stature that many have earned globally.
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Stronger communication and interactions between the local and federal levels will also benefit the implementation of the administration’s domestic priorities. The effort to achieve 50 percent greenhouse gas reduction by 2030 will necessitate a shared vision, alignment, and support among local, state, and national actors, as many of the policies and goals designed at the federal level will rely upon execution by local leaders. From land use decisions to infrastructure and shifts in policies and investments, execution to reach emission targets has a decidedly local flavor. The SDGs provide the platform that can enable local leaders to take on climate while meeting other concerns of their constituents, and provide a common language for local governments to cooperate with the national government as well as coordinate across the vast array of local jurisdictions.
To be successful domestically, the federal government will need to scale up local success and facilitate transfers of knowledge to lower the costs of a fair and equitable energy transition. Building holistic sustainable development plans locally requires practices such as decarbonization, energy transition, geo-explicit approaches, and data monitoring, which require staff, skills, and resources. Federal leadership could help scale up local action and successes by lowering the transaction costs of that exercise, using the SDGs as a universal toolbox so it doesn’t have to be done from scratch.
Recommendations
There are several recommendations that the Biden-Harris administration could embrace in both the short and long term:
1. Explicitly leverage and showcase local leadership and domestic SDG-climate models and innovations at COP26.
This could be done by including local leaders at planned events and forthcoming announcements and partnerships, and even including them on the official United States delegation. Ensuring partnership and regular, open communication between these stakeholders and the U.S. government delegation during the COP proceedings can help jointly reinforce mutually beneficial agendas. Finding ways at COP26 to lift up U.S. local leadership could be a powerful motivator for building additional global partnerships and ambition, and this approach has the added benefit of showcasing U.S. actions that are not beholden to current Congressional budget negotiations or the politics of federal elections. Another opportunity is showcasing the existing and multistakeholder political leadership and innovations already taking place at the local level, through mayors, governors, corporate leaders, and universities. It would demonstrate the global leadership of all segments of American society—after all, it is not just nation-states that will solve climate change.
2. Map and align any U.S. climate action plan to the SDGs.
Doing so would draw attention in the global community and is likely to be perceived as a signal of support for global cooperation that could enable increased international momentum for the U.S. climate agenda. It would also help integrate the interagency process domestically. The National Security Council (NSC) can take advantage of the interagency processes, particularly on Build Back Better, COP26, and climate finance, as an opportunity for using the SDGs to describe how U.S. climate commitments can lead to better economic and social outcomes. This would provide a powerful narrative to bolster its international leadership and engagements at COP26, pushing to accelerate the economic and other transitions needed to reach the targets laid out in the Paris Agreement, especially as many governments are grappling with making progress on climate change at the same time as achieving an equitable economic recovery from COVID-19.
3. Elevate the SDG-climate nexus in specific domestic initiatives, starting with Justice40.
Identifying specific pilot initiatives that advance climate action and the SDGs, including around measurements of equity and prosperity, would send an important signal that the Biden administration is committed to supporting action-oriented efforts in local communities. As Justice40 develops its approach, tools, and scorecards, it could act as a pilot by mapping to key SDG targets and disaggregating data by racial and other demographics to develop the evidence base and measure progress on justice and equity considerations. This initiative so clearly combines social and economic considerations with the administration’s climate ambitions, it provides a ready-made opportunity to explore and exploit the intersections between the two agendas. The increased accountability through the use of SDG data and targets would also provide additional basis for building trust with communities skeptical of these commitments, and could help institutionalize climate justice efforts beyond election cycles. It could also create a through-line for upcoming events on the political calendar that are priorities for the Biden Administration, moving from COP26 to the Summit for Democracy, for example.
4. Identify and develop processes and channels to align federal and local actions within the SDG-climate nexus.
Creating more regular and sustained policy channels among local, state, and national leaders would enable efficient local execution on the policy ambitions set forward by the U.S. national strategy and help identify best practices and innovations. Given the priority that local leaders are already giving to social and economic considerations, an alignment between climate action and the SDGs would be welcomed at the local level. This would also pay dividends in better connecting influential local leadership to diplomacy being done in global networks. Several coalitions could be leveraged, such as the U.S. Climate Alliance and WWF’s America is All In.
5. Announce an intention to conduct a U.S. Voluntary National Review (VNR) on the SDGs, to take advantage of the multiplier effect for U.S. commitments on equitable climate action both domestically and globally, and recognize the domestic applicability of the SDGs.
This offers additional reinforcement to the administration’s drive to build credibility and momentum for its global climate leadership. The United States is the only G-7 and G-20 country not to have submitted a VNR (nearly 170 countries have presented VNRs since 2016). A U.S. commitment to a VNR could create global momentum and attention that will add to its new commitments on climate action, connect its domestic action to its global leadership and investments, and provide another entry point for U.S. reengagement in the global multilateral community. Undertaking a VNR would also offer a “unified, measurable vision” that connects to the global development priorities that the U.S. government invests in and implements internationally through USAID, MCC, DFC, and the State Department.
Conclusion
The above ideas and recommendations would send important signals to domestic and foreign policy audiences that the Biden administration is committed to and is implementing policies and practices that ensure a more just, sustainable, and equitable recovery from the pandemic. Since the administration has not yet signaled its approach to the SDGs domestically, these ideas could also provide momentum for what it might do on the SDG framework in the United States as well. The Office of the Climate Advisor and the National Climate Task Force ought to have a major role as the administration determines its commitment to the SDGs overall. So too should regular channels of communication, learning, and policy exchange be established among the growing cohort of diverse American leaders committed to climate action and the SDGs that cities, states, corporations and investors, philanthropy, universities, and civil society are already carrying forward.
The COVID-19 pandemic, a quickly warming planet, and the murder of George Floyd have demonstrated just how connected these issues are to one another, blurring the lines and important connections between domestic and global leadership from the U.S. The SDGs provide an important vehicle for the Biden administration to rebuild credibility at home and abroad and to implement a comprehensive climate action agenda rooted in equity and sustainability.
Moving beyond GDP: Sustainability, resilience, and inclusiveness for economic development
What is the best way to assess a nation’s prosperity, not just today but into the future? Growing concerns about climate change, rising inequality, unsustainable resource use, and destruction of nature highlight the need for new economic tools to ensure development is sustainable, resilient, and inclusive. Gross domestic product (GDP), the conventional measure of economic progress, overlooks many vital aspects of nature, sustainability and human development. Wealth accounting offers a powerful way to look ‘beyond GDP’ for a more comprehensive view of the sustainability of growth. As a leader in this field, the World Bank’s Changing Wealth of Nations 2021 report provides an updated database and rich analysis of the world’s wealth accounts spanning 146 countries from 1995 to 2018. It contains the widest set of assets covered so far, including the value of human capital broken down by gender, as well as many different forms of natural capital, including forests, cropland, mangroves, marine fisheries minerals, and fossil fuels.
How can wealth accounting improve our understanding of economic sustainability? Can it help countries address the challenges posed by climate change and the low-carbon transition? Can wealth accounting serve as a way for countries to move ‘beyond GDP’?
On October 28, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings and the World Bank will co-host a panel of leading experts on these issues. The discussion will be moderated by author and Financial Times Africa Editor David Pilling. Panelists will discuss the implications of new measurement approaches and the limits of GDP for encouraging sustainable development.
Viewers can submit questions via email to events@brookings.edu or on Twitter using #CWON2021.
Cautious optimism on the road to Glasgow
At the beginning of the summer, I noted how the climate-change narrative had changed in recent years, thanks to tremendous technological progress that has made green energy more competitive and often less costly than older carbon-based technologies. This is certainly true for new power investments, although for a while it will still be cheaper to produce electricity from older assets with sunk costs than to build new green plants. But in the medium term, I argued, “the new win-win story” implies that “national gains and commercial profit can now drive progress” toward a green transformation.
Kemal Derviş
Senior Fellow – Global Economy and Development
Twitter
@Kemal_Dervis
The climate debate is thus no longer only about the costs of mitigation and how to share them in an equitable and politically feasible way. Instead, as Nicholas Stern has said in his report to the G7, “the transition to a zero-emissions and climate-resilient world provides the greatest economic, business, and commercial opportunity of our time.”
With the crucial United Nations climate-change summit (COP26) in Glasgow less than three weeks away, the positive developments in green energy certainly provide grounds for optimism. But an important caveat is in order.
It would be easy but incorrect to interpret the recent advances in green technologies as making emissions reduction less of a global public good (GPG). This GPG is measured by reductions in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations due to human activity. Less accumulation of these gases due to mitigation efforts remains a pure GPG: the benefits are non-rival and not excludable. Technological changes do not alter that fact. The “addition” to the GPG is the lowering of total greenhouse-gas concentrations due to a country’s own mitigation, and a given amount of mitigation anywhere will produce the same global benefit. At the same time, the net benefit of an isolated mitigation action—the difference between its benefits and its costs—will vary across countries. In the past, technological constraints meant the net benefit in terms of GDP was negative. It is quickly becoming positive for many countries, making a green transformation increasingly feasible.
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The point is necessary to bear in mind because the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear that the aggregate result of countries following their own most profitable development strategies would not provide enough global mitigation to limit climate change to an acceptable level. The damage and risks associated with global warming have become greater and more imminent, with broader and more volatile effects. In particular, the frequency and severity of extreme weather events directly linked to climate change has increased substantially. Moreover, the imminence of the threat means that frontloading mitigation—including earlier decommissioning of old power plants, among many other measures—is crucial.
If every country chose its preferred development strategy, the resulting non-cooperative outcome would result in unacceptably risky levels of emissions. The incentive problem has not disappeared. Yes, in many countries, technology will increasingly allow positive economic gains from mitigation. But these countries will still not have the incentive to mitigate with the same intensity and urgency that they would if the global benefits were part of their cost-benefit calculation.
So, while the emergence of net national economic benefits from emissions-reduction efforts is certainly a welcome development, an optimal global solution will require more and earlier mitigation than would result if each country responded only to its own incentives. In fact, the latest IPCC report suggests that the gap between the sum of national strategies and a globally optimal approach may even have increased.
The IPCC report should temper the optimism fueled by recognition of green energy’s profitability. It should foster broad acceptance of the need for multilateral efforts to provide sufficient incentives for climate-change mitigation, and to mobilize financial resources to enable all countries to make large green investments that are profitable in the long term. As for incentives, some form of carbon pricing is a powerful spur, and together with regulations—such as banning the production of cars powered by internal combustion engines after a certain date—can set expectations and drive the necessary shift in investments.
Fortunately, an important feature of the new climate narrative—not related to the economic cost-benefit analysis concerning mitigation—should facilitate the cooperative solutions that are still needed. This is the stronger support for ambitious climate policies, rooted in ethical considerations, from civil society around the world.
For many, the preservation of the planet as we know it, including its species and biodiversity, is a near-absolute ethical imperative. A lot of people in green movements in developed countries not only support frontloaded mitigation at home but also seem ready to commit some of their income to finance the green transition in poorer countries.
We don’t know exactly how many would be willing to give up how much, but climate ethics has become a significant political force, particularly among young people. This should help make possible the ambitious climate policies required, including the mobilization of resources for developing countries in support of early mitigation measures.
In an age shaped by the reemergence of populist nationalism, green internationalism may provide an increasingly influential counterweight. The COP26 gathering will provide a telling indication of its current strength.
20211015 Thomson Reuters Foundation Aloysius Uche Ordu
Africa is the world’s breadbasket—or should be. It has vast arable land, grows a wide variety of crops and has vast irrigation potential with seven major rivers. Yet, Africa imported $43 billion worth of food items in 2019. Digital technologies … are eliminating the traditional inefficiencies of smallholder food production and helping to close the yield gap.
Improving learning and life skills for marginalized children
Even before COVID-19 shuttered schools around the world, rapidly expanding access to high-quality learning opportunities for all children was critically needed. The pandemic has only exacerbated the magnitude, inequity, and urgency of this need. While many innovations exist—often emerging outside the formal education system—the question has increasingly become how to scale and sustain those that are most effective at improving learning for all.
Patrick Hannahan
Former Project Director, Millions Learning Project – The Brookings Institution
Jenny Perlman Robinson
Senior Fellow – Global Economy and Development, Center for Universal Education
Twitter
@JennyPerlman
Christina Kwauk
Nonresident Fellow – Global Economy and Development, Center for Universal Education
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CKwauk
In response, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings has been investigating efforts to scale and sustain evidence-based initiatives leading to large-scale improvements in children’s learning. CUE is implementing a series of Real-time Scaling Labs (RTSL), in partnership with local institutions in several countries, to generate evidence and provide practical recommendations around the process of scaling in global education—encouraging a stronger link between research and practice.
This report focuses on one of the scaling labs launched in Tanzania in 2018 in collaboration with the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED). It examines the process of implementing, adapting, and scaling the Learner Guide Program, which delivers life skills and mentorship provided by local female secondary school graduates (Learner Guides) to secondary school students as part of an 18-month volunteer program, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MoEST) and the President’s Office, Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG).
Learner Guide Program: Improving education outcomes and supporting young women’s transition to the workforce
Established in 2005, CAMFED Tanzania has worked in partnership with local communities and government to co-create locally sustainable solutions to address barriers to girls’ education, supporting more than 88,000 marginalized girls to attend primary school and 54,000 girls to attend secondary school. Central to these efforts has been the Learner Guide Program, designed to improve education outcomes among marginalized children while simultaneously opening pathways for young women to transition from school to the workforce.
Learner Guides are recent female secondary-school graduates who volunteer in their communities for several hours per week to provide life skills facilitation, one-on-one mentorship, and links to social services, which in turn improve girls’ and boys’ attendance and performance in school. In return for their service, these young women receive skills training, interest-free loans to start small-scale enterprises, and an internationally recognized Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC) qualification, which serve as a stepping stone to formal teacher training and employment. These incentives are coupled with the increased respect, leadership, and social standing the Learner Guides receive in their communities.
The Learner Guide Program has effectively traversed three phases of scaling to date—pilot, adaptation, and expansion. Throughout these phases, independent evaluations have averred significant and positive impact in schools where Learner Guides are operational, including improvements in students’ learning, girls’ retention in school, and young women’s livelihoods. The program is now on the threshold of its fourth, most critical phase of transition to national scale. Lessons from the previous phases can inform efforts to further expand the program’s reach and impact to many more disadvantaged children.
Lessons learned and recommendations to strengthen the Learner Guide Program’s expansion and inform future scaling efforts
The Learner Guide Program scaling journey to date has revealed lessons and associated recommendations centered around three key themes, which will continue to play a critical role in future scaling efforts. These lessons and recommendations can help CAMFED and the Tanzanian government formulate plans to further expand the impact of the Learner Guide Program, but they also include transferable lessons relevant for a broad spectrum of stakeholders involved in designing, implementing, researching, or otherwise supporting the scaling of an evidence-based education intervention.
1. Embedding the Learner Guide Program into the formal education system
Focus on how the program contributes to government policies and priorities
Plan for the evolving roles of government and innovators
Utilize financial and nonfinancial local incentives
Support an interministerial coordinating structure with sufficient knowledge and authority
2. Securing flexible and long-term financing for Learner Guide implementation
Engage directly with government budget processes and timelines
Build upon costed scaling analysis to guide strategic decisionmaking
3. Implementing a continuous learning process in support of the Learner Guide Program’s expansion
Continue to test adaptations to the model as it scales and use iterative feedback loops to analyze the impact of adaptations
Adapt and apply a collaborative learning approach to support education systems change
The Learner Guide Program finds itself at a critical inflection point after eight years of ongoing adaptation, learning, and expansion. It can remain an effective NGO-led program—working in collaboration with government and community stakeholders—or it can transition to a government-led initiative—embedding in the national education system with the opportunity to impact many more lives. The Learner Guide Program’s scaling journey in Tanzania to date offers valuable lessons to support further expansion of its impact and reach. At the same time, it serves as a case study for the education community into larger questions of how an evidence-based initiative can achieve progress toward national sustainable scale, with insights that are transferable beyond Tanzania.
More information about the Learning Guide program’s scaling journey and these lessons and recommendations are further detailed in the full report and in the summary findings.
Photo credit: Eliza Powell
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