After Farce: Why Education Financing Needs an Honest Reckoning

In this blog post, Will Brehm examines whether education can remain a public good and a human right amid the rise of ‘investability’ in development financing. This blogpost is part of NORRAG’s “Financing Education” blog series.

Development financing is in crisis. Official development assistance dropped 9% in 2024 and is set to fall another 9% this year. For the first time in three decades, France, Germany, and the UK cut their aid budgets simultaneously. The United States slashed its aid budget by 80%. In education, there’s an estimated $97 billion annual financing gap. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—the global framework for reducing poverty and improving education, health, and environmental sustainability by 2030—are failing. Only 18% of the goal’s 169 targets are on track, with nearly a fifth actually regressing. As discussions begin about what type of global development agenda comes after 2030, these failures demand honest reckoning.

At the DevEd 2025 conference in Melbourne, Australia in November—an initiative of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) organised in partnership with DFAT and the UK’s FCDO—I participated in a panel examining whether we’re entering a “new era” in education financing. The central question was how the development establishment should respond to this crisis. Their answer has been to double down on what economist Daniela Gabor calls the “Wall Street Consensus“—using public money to de-risk private investment as a way to make up the shortfall of ODA. We are told we must do “more with less.”

But this approach raises a fundamental question: Can education remain a universal human right and public good while being restructured as an asset class?

The New Language of Development

Over the past decade, the development establishment has slowly shifted from talking about morality and rights to emphasizing “investability”, proving that education can generate returns for investors. The mantra is de-risking, public-private partnerships, blended finance, and impact investing. Speaking about development financing more generally, former US Secretary of State John Kerry recently captured this logic:

The narrative of morality, powerful as it should be and is and was, brought us a certain distance. Now we need the power of investability. The power of showing people that you can invest and have money come back to you.

The latest example of this logic operating within education is the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd), launched in 2022 and soon to make its first investments. IFFEd uses long-term donor aid commitments as guarantees to issue bonds on capital markets. Institutional investors—pension funds, insurance companies—purchase these bonds, providing upfront capital for education. Countries then repay the bonds over time using their own revenues while donors guarantee investor returns.

The promise sounds compelling: mobilize private capital now when it’s needed most. But this converts aid into debt, transforms education systems into revenue-generating assets that must satisfy bond market confidence, and shifts governance from democratic accountability to market accountability. When education funding depends on maintaining investor confidence, policy decisions must prioritize predictability and measurable returns over equity or broader educational purposes. Brett Christophers’ investigation of the rise of asset managers in statecraft captures this trend:

The picture that emerges of the asset management sector is…one of a distinctly centripetal force that takes the profits of real-asset investments and forcefully concentrates them, distributing them disproportionately inwards and upwards, and thus bolstering the wealth of the existing global elite.

This logic is becoming institutionalized across the development sector. In January 2026, the World Bank will merge its public and private sector arms for the first time, shifting “from a model that rewards production to one that rewards impact,” as its President, Ajay Banga, recently put it. But impact for whom?

An Alternative Development Story

While Western institutions promote market-based solutions in the lead up to a post-2030 global agenda, another development story demands our attention. Since the 1980s, China has lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty, three-quarters of the global reduction. Life expectancy more-or-less equals the United States at 78 years. Secondary enrollment is nearly universal.

This wasn’t achieved through de-risking or blended finance. It came from industrial policy combining substantial public investment with private sector discipline—and it’s increasingly attractive to countries in the Global South seeking alternatives without the conditionalities that typically accompany Western development finance. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, we should not be surprised, is seeing a resurgence in deals post-Covid.

The Conditionalities We Don’t Discuss

Why is this alternative paradigm so attractive? For decades, Western institutions have proclaimed sovereign equality while simultaneously intervening through conditionalities and policy prescriptions. We say we respect national ownership while making aid contingent on governance reforms and institutional restructuring aligned with donor preferences.

Blended finance doesn’t come free. It requires governance requirements and policy reforms. Education funding increasingly depends on a country’s ability to create “bankable” projects and open markets to private investment.

This creates a fundamental contradiction: we speak of education as a universal human right while deploying financing mechanisms that are selective and conditional. It’s universalism for those who comply.

Four Critical Risks

If we continue down this path, we risk eroding trust in multilateral institutions that claim universal values but advance the interests of private capital. We risk driving countries in the Global South toward alternative partnerships that (rhetorically) offer sovereign equality. We risk losing moral authority to speak about education as a universal right when we make that right conditional. Most fundamentally, we risk misunderstanding the problem entirely. This isn’t just a financing gap; it’s a legitimacy gap of the global development agenda advanced by the United Nations.

What Comes After Farce?

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. If the first global agenda, the Millennium Development Goals, was an ambitious but flawed tragedy, the Sustainable Development Goals have become a farce, a performance that mimics development while delivering something quite different.

So, what comes after farce? Perhaps the answer is realism—not cynical realism, but honest reckoning. A recognition that development relationships have been fundamentally unequal, that our financing models reflect and reinforce that inequality, and that countries have options we may not control. In other words, a recognition that development is political.

The urgent question isn’t just “what’s next for education financing?” It’s whether we can adapt to this reality while genuinely protecting education as a public good. Otherwise, “innovative financing” will simply mean converting education from a right into a return to benefit those already in power.

The Author:

Will Brehm is an Associate Professor in Comparative and International Education at the University of Canberra.

I’d like to thank Sara Black for alerting me to Hal Foster’s book What Comes after Farce: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (Verso, 2020), which inspired the title of this blog post.