Strategic Areas



Education Unit Strategic Areas

Our work has been advanced through three main strategic areas and lines of action:

Support for operations:

Over the past 8 years, all the education and science and technology projects of the Bank have been reviewed by EDU at some point of their processing, and more than half of them have counted with the direct participation of EDU staff in mission work, supporting the project team.

The Education Unit has been repeatedly recognized by all three regional operations departments for the quality of its work in supporting operations, and for its consistency over the years in doing so.

For the Unit, such a close association with the work of operational divisions in the social sector has been an invaluable channel through which mainstreaming of new ideas and approaches to education and science and technology policy has taken place. It has also allowed for a natural and easy assimilation of new strategies, since the constant interaction with colleagues during the period in which strategies are prepared ends up incorporating their field experience and technical expertise into the document in a timely and reflective way.

The Unit has also being proactive over the years in encouraging the private sector arms of the Bank to become involved in supporting education in the region, although admittedly with much less success. Recent developments, however, both in the region and within the Bank, seem to present a renewed opportunity to insist on this point.



Development and technical supervision of regional programs:

Through close collaboration with the Integration Department, the Unit has played a leading role in the organization and management of the Regional Policy Dialogue in Education, a periodic gathering of vice-ministers of education of Latin America and the Caribbean, with the purpose of sharing good practices and debating education policy issues. 8 meetings have taken place ever since 2001. As a result of the dynamic interaction created by the regional meetings of the Dialogue, sub-regional groupings of education authorities have consolidated in the Southern Cone, the English Speaking Caribbean, Central America and the Andean countries, that now meet regularly one or twice a year to discuss their own priorities and prepare the region-wide meeting. This dynamics has been assimilated starting this year by similar Dialogue meeting that the Bank supports in sectors other than education.

In addition EDU has worked consistently through regional cooperation non-reimbursable financing- in supporting Latin American initiatives on assessment testing, integration of ICT and education (see above) and other areas of education policy. A highlight in recent activities of the Unit has been the responsibility for coordinating the Inter-American Teacher Training Program, a mandate of the Summit of the Americas held in Quebec, that has led to the production of over 100 DVDs with high-quality content to be used for the training of teachers of secondary education in Latin America. Production has been advanced through a partnership with ILCE (Latin American Instituto for Communication) and the Mexican Secretary or Education. Materials have been so far mainstreamed in the official teacher education programs in Chile and are in the process of being disseminated in Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua.

The recent addition of the fund for the financing of Regional Public Goods has added one more resource to the Unit, as exemplified in the recent approval of the RELPE project (Regional Network of Education Portals).



Knowledge management:

The landmark of efforts along this line has been the substantial effort made for the preparation of the sector strategies between 1997 and 2001:

Primary and Secondary
Vocational and Technical training
Higher Education
Science and Technology

To this it has to be added the ongoing work on the sector-wide Education Strategy, now available in draft and undergoing external consultation. Special background research work was undertaken, with the new strategy in mind, on education finance, systematic approaches to commonalities and differences in the education situation of borrower countries, education and social exclusion and the policy-making process in education, as well as a specialized seminar on current perspectives on the 1998 IDB Higher Education Strategy and an overall review of education reforms across the region.

In preparing these documents, EDU has proceeded by becoming a focal point of intense discussion within the Bank about the proper role of the IDB in each level and modality of education, as well as about the diagnostic of the main education policy issues facing Latin America and the Caribbean. This approach to strategy preparation has paid off in the form of an easy mainstreaming of the strategy in operations, the only partial exception being the case of the higher education strategy, which has proven to be more difficult to assimilate by the Bank.

In addition to -and in direct connection with- the development of the strategies, the Education Unit has chosen a limited set of issues on which to concentrate knowledge production and dissemination, with the hope of having and impact on policy-making in the region and, correspondingly, on Bank operations.