By Svein Østtveit, Interim Director, UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Manos Antoninis, Director, Global Education Monitoring Report
The new 2026 SDG 4 Scorecard, released today, shows that 170 countries have translated global education ambitions into national commitments – and how they are progressing towards them. This approach helps shift the narrative from whether the global agenda of all countries achieving the same, universal targets will be realized to whether governments will meet the commitments they set themselves – first and foremost for their citizens, secondly for the rest of the world.
Since 2019, the SDG 4 benchmarking process, led jointly by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the GEM Report, has helped countries set national targets, or benchmarks, for eight key SDG 4 indicators. Rather than assessing progress only against a single, one-size-fits-all global target, countries were encouraged to share what they aimed to achieve by 2025 and 2030, considering their starting points, capacities and ambitions.
By assessing progress against the commitments that countries have set for themselves in the 2026 SDG 4 Scorecard, as opposed to against global targets, the education community has a more meaningful basis for accountability, policy dialogue and peer learning, while preserving a common framework for global monitoring.
Together, the UIS and the GEM Report make SDG 4 benchmarking possible by combining the UIS’s international statistical standards, harmonized methodologies and technical support to countries with the GEM Report’s global monitoring, policy analysis and advocacy, ensuring that benchmarking is not simply a reporting exercise but a tool for informing policy and improving education systems.A recent consultation run by the UIS with 25 member states of the Education Data and Statistics Commission showed that 15 had wrapped the benchmarks into their national plans and fed them into national policy dialogue, while 21 reported that they had been useful or essential for national decision making.
The 2026 GEM Report, the first in a three-part Countdown to 2030 series, emphasized the importance of the benchmarking approach as one of the most important lessons from monitoring SDG 4 since 2015, as countries are more likely to engage with targets that reflect their circumstances and priorities. Including several country case studies, it demonstrated that context plays an indisputable role in determining progress, which has to be reflected in the targets that countries choose to hold themselves accountable for.
Building on this lesson, the Education Data and Statistics Commission has proposed that future global development goals after 2030, in education and other sectors, should be built from the aggregation of national commitments rather than relying solely on a single universal target against which all countries are assessed.
What do countries’ targets tell us?
One of the benefits of this approach is that, by accumulating countries’ national SDG 4 targets, we can paint a picture of where the world could realistically be by 2030.
If all countries achieved the targets they have set for themselves, 91% of children would participate in early childhood education by 2030 one year before primary school. The out-of-school rate among lower secondary school-age adolescents would fall from 14% in 2015 to 6% in 2030. Completion rates would reach 94% in primary education, 89% in lower secondary education and 73% in upper secondary education. Some 63% of children would reach minimum proficiency in reading at the end of primary school. Countries would ensure that 85% of primary schools are connected to the internet and that 93% of pre-primary teachers are trained.
These figures do not fully match the ambition expressed in the SDG 4 global targets. Yet they represent goals that countries have actively chosen, endorsed and incorporated into their planning processes. They therefore provide a realistic picture of the progress governments believe is achievable by 2030.
Are countries on track to meet their own commitments?
The Scorecard reveals a mixed picture.
Data gaps continue to limit accountability
However, the Scorecard also highlights a more fundamental problem: the lack of data, and the fact that this is holding countries back from setting a clear long-term vision for the progress they want to achieve.
Around 45% of countries have no data at all on minimum reading proficiency at the end of primary education, while a further 23% lack sufficient data to establish trends. As a result, fewer than one third of countries have enough information to assess whether progress is on track.
These data gaps are especially severe in low- and lower-middle-income countries, where only 17% and 10% of countries respectively have sufficient information to measure trends.
What comes next?
Countries’ growing engagement with the benchmarking process, together with their own accounts of how it is informing national planning and decision-making, demonstrates the value of this approach for the remainder of the SDG era and beyond. Benchmarking has shown that global goals are most meaningful when they are translated into nationally owned commitments. Future global targets, in education and other sectors, should therefore be built from the aggregation of nationally determined ambitions rather than imposed as single universal targets.
