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UNESCO Access and Equity
UNESCO Launch of the 2026 GEM Report: Access and Equity Countdown to 2030
Paris, UNESCO Headquarters — 25 March 2026
Today at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris, world education leaders, ministers, and advocates gathered for the high-level launch of the 2026 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, titled Access and Equity: Countdown to 2030. The event, held under the hashtag #YourStoryCounts, brought together a diverse international cast of speakers, as seen in the images from the ceremony; to mark a critical moment in global education accountability.
What is the 2026 GEM Report?
The 2026 GEM Report takes stock of progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) and highlights where learners are still being left behind, with a particular focus on equitable access to education. European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education It is the first in a three-part Countdown to 2030 series, designed to assess education progress in access and equity (2026), quality and learning (2027), and relevance (2028/9). UNESCO
The Scale of the Challenge
The global out-of-school population is estimated at 272 million in 2023, 21 million more than the previous estimate. UNESCO Yet the report also presents an encouraging counterpoint: with 1.4 billion students enrolled in school in 2024, enrolment had increased by 327 million, or 30%, in primary and secondary education since 2000 and by 45% in pre-primary and 161% in post-secondary education. UNESCO
Key Findings
Progress is best understood by comparing countries that started from similar points. Between 2000 and 2024, Mexico cut out-of-school rates over 20 percentage points more than El Salvador; Sierra Leone increased primary completion rates 22 points more than Liberia; and Iraq increased its secondary completion rate 10 points more than Algeria. UNESCO
On financing equity, the share of countries deploying equity-oriented financing mechanisms has increased by 4 to 6 times in the past 25 years, but fewer than 1 in 10 countries have a sufficiently strong equity focus. UNESCO
A new tool introduced in the report, the Equitable Financing Index (EFI), measures how strongly a country's education and social protection financing systems are geared towards helping disadvantaged learners, looking at whether countries have equity-oriented programmes, how much they spend, and how many people they reach. UNESCO
The Event
The launch took place back-to-back with the Global Education Coalition's sixth annual meeting (March 23–24). The morning session featured opening remarks, a presentation of the report, a ministerial panel on access and equity, and a ministerial debate on policies to address the out-of-school population. The afternoon featured thematic policy discussions co-organized with UNESCO and partners. UNESCO
The panel of speakers, visible in the images from the event, included dignitaries such as H.E. Giuseppe Valditara (Minister of Education, Italy), H.E. Samaria dos Anjos Filemon Tovela (Minister of Education, Mozambique), H.E. Lilas Desquiron (Ambassador, Permanent Delegate of Haiti to UNESCO), Araksya Svajyan (Deputy Minister, Armenia), Dr. Kraiyos Patrawart (Managing Director, Education Equity Fund, Thailand), and Tomoko Shibuya (Senior Education Advisor, UNICEF).
Drawing on 35 country case studies, the report examines why some countries expand education access faster than others and what policies help overcome barriers. X
Looking Ahead
Countries will not achieve access for all by 2030, but this does not mean the global education agenda has failed. UNESCO The report frames this moment not as a deadline, but as a turning point. Ministers of Education from all UNESCO Member States were invited to participate in this global discussion to kick-off conversations on a post-2030 agenda. Indico.UN
The 2026 GEM Report stands as both a reckoning and a road map, measuring how far the world has come and charting what must still be done to ensure every child's right to learn.
From Data to Action: How CityZeen Is Quietly Solving Education's Financing Gap
The numbers from UNESCO's 2026 GEM Report are stark, 272 million children still out of school, and fewer than one in ten countries investing with genuine equity intent. The diagnosis is clear. What has been missing, until now, is an accessible mechanism to turn private capital into public good.
That is precisely the gap CityZeen can solve.
At its core, CityZeen is a digital investment platform that does something deceptively simple: it opens the secondary real estate market to everyday investors in three clicks. No intermediaries, no complexity, no minimum wealth threshold. Through blockchain-backed tokenization of sustainable assets, the Paris and Toronto-based platform democratizes access to a class of investment, infrastructure and real estate, that has historically been reserved for institutional players and high-net-worth individuals.
The connection to education equity is direct. Schools need buildings. Buildings need land. Land needs financing. And across the Global South and underserved urban communities worldwide, that financing chain consistently breaks at the first link. CityZeen's model offers a concrete alternative: community-sourced, digitally transparent, and structured around sustainability, the very principles the GEM Report calls on governments to embed into their equity financing frameworks.
Where the GEM Report introduces the Equitable Financing Index to measure a government's intent to fund disadvantaged learners, CityZeen provides the private-sector infrastructure to act on that intent. Its liquidity pool mechanism allows investors to trade assets in real time, ensuring capital doesn't sit idle while classrooms remain unbuilt. Its regenerative finance approach, inspired by the Capital Institute's framework, aligns profit incentives with long-term community outcomes, including educational ones.
"We haven't had a chance to have financial education or ways to invest in assets," says CityZeen's co-founder. "Now we are solving this in a very genuine way." That statement, personal as it sounds, doubles as a mission statement for a platform that could help redirect private wealth toward the infrastructure SDG 4 so urgently needs.
As UNESCO counts down to 2030, the question is no longer whether the data justifies urgency, it does. The question is which tools can translate that urgency into square meters, school desks, and enrolled students. CityZeen, in its quiet, sophisticated way, is building exactly that bridge.
CityZeen operates from Paris and Toronto, with active investments across Europe, North America, and Latin America. You can go directly to your Store
