Education and Innovation Leadership in Conflict-Affected Regions: Which Sustainable Development Goal Indicators Matter?

Education and innovation systems in conflict-affected regions face severe disruption, reversing progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and highlighting the need for evidence-based tools to guide recovery. Identifying the most relevant SDG indicators is crucial for supporting education and innovation leadership under conditions of fragility. The aim of this study is to determine which SDG indicators are most appropriate for assessing and steering education and science reforms in countries affected by armed conflict between 1990 and 2020. The analysis is based on World Bank SDG statistics for 16 countries across the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Ukraine. A panel dataset was normalised using Z-scores, and Principal Component Analysis was applied to reduce dimensionality and extract the most relevant indicators from Goals 4, 8, and 9. The findings revealed 58 significant indicators: 23 for Goal 4, grouped into vectors capturing out-of-school children and adolescents, completion rates, over-age enrolment, and gender parity; 26 for Goal 8, covering employment distribution across agriculture, industry and services, wage and salaried employment, and youth not in education, employment or training; and 9 for Goal 9, focused on air transport flows, CO₂ emissions, manufacturing value added, and R&D expenditure. PCA explained over 86% of the total variance for Goal 4, 92% for Goal 8, and 84% for Goal 9, underscoring the robustness of indicator selection. The results show that reforms must address not only educational access and quality, but also labour market resilience and innovation infrastructure to support a long-term, sustainable recovery. This framework provides policymakers with a targeted evidence-based set of SDG indicators for tracking progress and designing reform roadmaps in conflict-affected regions.