The Challenge

The Education Commission was established in 2015 to help reach the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4 by 2030–-ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. The urgency is clear: more than 250 million youth around the world are out of school, and more than half a billion children and youth are in school but not learning the basics needed to thrive. 

The Commission is focused on creating the necessary financing and funding structures to support quality education and learning for all. The organization needed to build momentum and public support for an innovative new funding mechanism, the International Finance Facility for Education, that will generate up to an additional $10 billion in education funding per year.

 Our Work & Results

Asibey Consulting partnered with the Education Commission to build the necessary public support for this new funding proposal. To make it happen, we needed commitment and support from many different entities in both industrialized countries and in the Global South: governments, multilateral institutions, civil society organizations, businesses, activists and everyday people who care about education. 

Asibey’s work consisted of making this new Facility a matter of public record. We led external communications and helped coordinate the public advocacy necessary to build support of the Education Commission and understanding of the International Finance Facility for Education. This meant simplifying the messaging and making a complex, technical concept accessible. 

Our work consisted of:

• media opportunities for the Commissioners involved in the project—former heads of state, private sector leaders, high-profile activists—including opinion articles and interviews in top-tier, international media;

• a digital strategy that included website content and social media campaigns, a one-of-a-kind- video, influencer activation, and other digital tactics that sought to inform and engage; and 

• easy-to-access messaging and assets to be used by the Education Commission’s partners around the world to do their own public campaigning at the country level on behalf of the Finance Facility. 

Asibey secured over 100 media placements worldwide featuring the voices of the various Commissioners—in three languages—including stories on CNN (international), El País (Spain, Latin America and Brazil), the Associated Press (international), Washington Post (U.S.), and Project Syndicate (International). 

Digital messages reached and engaged far and wide, and were amplified by global influencers such as philanthropist and education activist Shakira--a member of the Education Commission—as well as many others. At the time, the one-of-a-kind video attracted more than 2 million views, which drove nearly 13,000 visits to the campaign website to learn more about the education financing plan.

Our collective efforts helped build momentum towards the 2017 Group of 20 (G20) Summit that took place in Hamburg, Germany. On that occasion, the G20 leaders publicly recognized, for the first time, the need to establish the International Finance Facility for Education.