Dear Friends, We are delighted to have secured funding from the GPE EOL to form a transnational Tax and Education Alliance (The TaxEd Alliance) that brings together, ActionAid, the Tax Justice Network (TJN), the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ), nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and its regional networks – Tax Justice Network Africa (TJN-A) and Tax and Fiscal Justice Asia (TAFJA) – together with Education International (EI) – with close practical links with the global education movement - the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) and their regional and national coalitions.

The focus countries for the project are Nepal, Senegal and Zambia.

The goal of the project is to sustainably increase the domestic financing of public education systems so developing country governments can achieve SDG4. Our Alliance will enable civil society partners to contribute to a more strategic dialogue on domestic financing, linking particularly with Ministries of Finance and Education, Members of Parliament and other actors. In order to achieve this sea change in financing of education, the project has developed an approach that:

• Establishes and builds the capacity of a new transnational Tax and Education Alliance,
• Develops improved mechanisms and facilitates cross-sector dialogue between Alliance members at national and regional level with government and regional stakeholders to develop innovative responses to the issues of financing for education and tax justice,
• Builds a comprehensive body of research to provide evidence for policy work that will generate recommendations and commitments by government for tax and education financing reforms,
• Opens up transnational policy debates to include civil society voices, links national policy setting for education budgets and tax reforms with international and regional frameworks,
• Organizes a comprehensive advocacy and influencing program based on research evidence to bring about commitments by government to take action to reform domestic tax policy or practice.

The strong alliance between these civil society organizations and teachers’ unions will play an essential role in bringing about sustainable change in education financing policy, increasing the size and share of budgets supported by fair tax and revenue frameworks to improve decision-making mechanisms and accountability processes, by improving the scrutiny and sensitivity of the education budgets.

Through this alliance, we will work to ensure that the voices of citizens and marginalized groups are heard in national and international policy debates. Together we can be the catalyst to bring governments, international organizations and CSOs together to ensure that Covid19 marks a positive turning point in domestic financing of education.

We look forward to collaborating with the other grantees and share learning.