Education ministers, donors, and philanthropic foundations have called for government-led, evidence-based foundational learning reforms at the scale and pace needed to reach every classroom and improve learning outcomes. On the margins of the 81st United Nations General Assembly, the Global Coalition for Foundational Learning, in partnership with Fundação Leman, convened Strong Foundations, Shared Futures: Accountability for Learning Outcomes to highlight the urgent need to turn political will into reforms that improve learning in classrooms, reach children facing exclusion and instability, and equip learners for a changing world increasingly shaped by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Speaking at the session, Lucía Dellagnelo, Deputy Director, Directorate for Education and Skills, OECD, announced that the OECD has been invited to serve as a knowledge partner for the IBSA Initiative on Foundational Learning, bringing together India, Brazil and South Africa, with a particular focus on early childhood and primary education. IBSA, launched by President Ramaphosa, Prime Minister Modi and President Lula at the 2025 G20 Summit in South Africa, is supported by Fundação Lemann, the Gates Foundation, and the OECD to examine how major interventions have been designed and delivered across the three countries, including what has enabled successful approaches to work at scale.
Dellagnelo highlighted findings from the OECD’s recently released 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), representing approximately 33 million 15-year-olds worldwide. The results showed that 20% of students are now low performers across reading, mathematics and science, while digital schools and digital tools remain a growing challenge to learning.“The world is no longer divided by rich and high-performing countries and poor and low-performing countries. We see good results and bad results everywhere, and we believe every child should leave the early years of education with strong foundations to keep learning throughout life. Measuring skills at 15 years old is far too late to identify the foundational skills that should have been developed much earlier.”
According to 2022 World Bank estimates, 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple text. In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is closer to 90%. Political commitment has risen. Recent Center for Global Development analysis shows that foundational learning and some of the strongest evidence-based interventions (structured pedagogy and targeted instruction) are increasingly appearing in national plans, with African leaders pledging to end learning poverty by 2035. However, commitment, funding, and evidence need to translate into systemic reforms that reach the classroom and improve learning outcomes.
The regional discussion reflected the gaps between national commitments and implementation. H.E. Prof. Gaspard Banyankimbona, Commissioner for Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, African Union (AU), shared a regional perspective advocating for a shift from declarations of goodwill to collective implementation and measurable results, presenting the AU’s Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA) 2026-2035, which puts foundational learning at the heart of Africa’s transformation agenda.
The African Continental Foundational Learning Monitoring Framework, being developed by the AU and UNICEF, is intended to help member states compare progress, identify effective practices, and adapt solutions to local contexts.
Pia Britto, Global Director, Education, UNICEF, highlighted the Foundational Learning Action Tracker (FLAT) as a tool to move beyond commitments and track government action on foundational learning in more than 120 countries. Early findings from the 2026 edition, due to be released in November, show that 78% of governments have established efforts to support foundational learning. Pia said: “Important implementation gaps remain: seven in ten countries report using assessment data for national policy and planning, compared with around four in ten at the classroom level; this is where the efforts now need to be.”
Dr Yogita Rana, IAS, Principal Secretary to Government, School Education, Government of Telangana, drew on datasets linking education and economic growth, noting that most countries with trillion-dollar economies have higher-education gross enrolment ratios above 80%. In comparison, many countries in Asia and Africa remain as low as approximately 20–30%. She concluded, saying, “The pipeline of learners from primary to higher education misses out precisely because the child is not confident to pursue further study because the child doesn’t know foundational literacy and numeracy; the child cannot comprehend what the child is reading. Critical and logical thinking is totally missing.”
Sierra Leone highlighted what it can mean for governments to act when evidence challenges expectations. Hon. Conrad Sackey, Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, described how independent evaluation of the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge showed stronger learning gains in mathematics than in English, prompting the government to examine what needed to change. Sierra Leone has since established a National Learning Assessment Unit to strengthen its capacity to interrogate learning data and respond to the evidence.
Brazil demonstrated how the National Commitment for Literate Children, introduced in 2023 tracks progress and strengthen accountability across all levels of government. The initiative helped the federal government, states, and municipalities agree on literacy targets tailored to each territory, with the shared goal of ensuring that 80% of Brazilian children are literate by 2030.
To monitor these targets, Brazil established the Child Literacy Indicator in 2024 to adopt a common national literacy metric, strengthening the frequent collection and use of classroom data for improvement and accountability and making results visible beyond government. The share of children meeting the literacy benchmark increased from 56% in 2023 to 66% in 2025, surpassing the national target. Brazil is now extending its focus to numeracy.
“Beyond its positive results, the commitment has shown how collaborative governance can work in practice, offering lessons, tools, training structures, and institutional mechanisms that strengthen local implementation capacity and are helping shape the design of the new system,” said Katia Helena Schweickardt, Secretary of Basic Education, Ministry of Education, Brazil.
The government discussion also drew on pre-recorded contributions from Hon. Siviwe Gwarube, Minister of Basic Education, South Africa, and Sanjay Kumar, former Secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education, Government of India. Across the panellists’ contributions, speakers emphasised the importance of collaboration across government from national to sub-national. They urged support for government-led delivery to make interventions more effective, ensuring evidence and policy alignment with classroom materials and teaching, sustaining financing, assessment, instructional support, and championing the idea that literacy and math are not isolated outcomes but crucial to youth development in a rapidly changing technological world.
Madame Sendra Nirina Rajaonarison, Minister of Education, Madagascar, described how Madagascar is working to translate successful foundational learning interventions into national public policy. “The transformation involves several levers: the curriculum, teacher training and support, textbooks, and assessment, and it exposes something essential: even in a challenging context, learning can progress when results are measured, creating the conditions to replicate them on a larger scale.”
The convening followed the Global Partnership for Education’s Multiply Possibility High Level Event earlier the same afternoon, where donors, development finance institutions and philanthropic partners renewed their commitments to education financing.
Against a backdrop of fresh capital commitments, the convening closed with governments, development partners, and philanthropic foundations outlining a more catalytic approach to external support—one grounded in evidence, assessment data, and robust monitoring; aligned with government leadership; and focused on durable, system-level reforms. External financing and technical assistance should be catalytic, match the scale of the challenge while complementing, rather than substituting for, national resources and capacity and strengthen the foundations for sustained progress.