SDG 4 Scorecard dashboard

The SDG 4 benchmark process, supported by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Global Education Monitoring Report, responds to the Education 2030 Framework for Action which had called on countries to establish ‘appropriate intermediate benchmarks ... for addressing the accountability deficit associated with longer-term targets’. 

Overall, 164 countries - 80% have submitted benchmarks, or national targets, to be achieved by 2025 and 2030 for at least one of eight SDG 4 indicators.  Apart from the public expenditure indicators, for which there is a common benchmark for all countries, the two benchmark indicators with the highest submission rates are the early childhood education participation rate (71%) and the upper completion rate (69%). The two indicators with the lowest submission rates are the gender gap in upper secondary completion (37%), and school internet connectivity (38%). 

• furthest behind from their 2025 national targets in training pre‑primary school teachers (off track by 7 percentage points), expanding early childhood education participation (off track by 9 percentage points) and achieving minimum proficiency in reading by the end of primary (off track by 11 percentage points).
• moving backwards in terms of public education spending, which was further away from the twin thresholds of 4% of gross domestic product and 15% of total public expenditure in 2023 than in 2015.

The 2025 SDG 4 Scorecard cannot yet make a final assessment of whether countries achieved their 2025 benchmarks, as much of the data still refer to 2023. In the meantime, the focus will be on the probability of countries reaching their benchmarks. 

Countries have been classified into six categories: four capture the speed of progress since 2010 or 2015 – and its implication for the probability of achieving the benchmark – and two categories capture countries where there is not enough available data. For countries without national benchmarks (either submitted or extracted from national sector plans), progress is evaluated against their ‘feasible benchmarks’, which estimate where a country could be in 2025 if it achieved the same progress rate as the fastest improving 25% of countries.