- Once a city where only one in three children reached the expected learning level, Manaus is now among Brazil's fastest-growing capitals in educational quality.
- The combination of infrastructure, teacher training, and evidence-based assessment brought Manaus from just one in three students at grade level to a score of 6.2 on the 2023 IDEB.
- Manaus reduced its non-literate students from 18,000 to 2,000, establishing itself as a model for educational transformation in Latin America.
In Manaus, Brazil, 40 of 85 rural schools sit on the banks of the Negro and Amazon Rivers. One of those schools is where Uiranambi studies — an indigenous girl who dreams of studying veterinary medicine and medicine to help her community. To reach that goal, Beijaflor — or Hummingbird, as her name translates from the Baré language into Portuguese and Spanish — walks every morning from her home on a hilltop down to the dock, where she boards a school boat that takes 40 minutes to reach her school.
Nearly three hours away by boat, in a working-class neighborhood of the city of Manaus, Vinícius, a boy of about five, walks 25 minutes with his mother to begin his school day. His mother, five months pregnant, feels at ease knowing she can leave him in a comfortable, air-conditioned early childhood center equipped with solar panels, wastewater treatment, a cafeteria, and — above all — a trained staff ready to nurture her son and help him reach his full potential.
The stories of Uiranambi and Vinícius unfold in the same city, in different worlds, but they are bound by the same thread: a resolute commitment to transforming public education in Manaus from the ground up, and to building greater trust in the educational system as a safe place and the most powerful driver of social mobility.
A Challenging Starting Point
A decade ago, education in Manaus faced enormous challenges. Early childhood education coverage stood at just 26%, meaning only one in four young children could access an educational center. One in five primary school students was behind the grade level expected for their age. And only one in three reached the expected level in reading and math.
The city needed more than 10,000 new school places to keep up with its rapid population growth. Located in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus is a remarkable city: the sixth largest in the country, with more than two million inhabitants, an education network of 505 schools serving 258,000 students — the third largest in the country — and a population that continues to grow. A portion of those students live in riverside and indigenous communities accessible only by water, where river levels rise and fall and sometimes the boat simply doesn't arrive. Managing that diversity from the Municipal Education Secretariat is no small task.
It Wasn't Just About Building
Manaus, through the PROEMEM project — Projeto de Expansão e Melhoria Educacional da Rede Pública de Manaus (Project for the Expansion and Improvement of Manaus's Public Education Network) — financed with resources from the IDB under its regional coordination program Amazonía Siempre and the Municipality, and implemented from 2017 to 2024, committed to something comprehensive: combining physical infrastructure with three strategic pillars of educational transformation.
- New educational centers: seven new early childhood centers were built, along with nine integrated municipal education centers serving both early childhood and primary education.
- Remedial and accelerated learning programs for students who were falling behind, including a weekly "sixth period" of four additional hours of class focused on Portuguese language and math skills.
- Continuous training for more than 30,000 teachers and education professionals, focused on classroom practice, peer exchange, and the pedagogical use of digital technology. This included the development of a media center that produces audiovisual content — designed specifically to reinforce learning with some of the best teachers, based on needs identified throughout the educational process.
- Information and evaluation systems that deliver disaggregated data — by network, school, classroom, and student — to principals and teachers, so that pedagogical decisions are made based on evidence rather than intuition alone.
All of this was designed with a clear theory of change, evidence-based interventions, and a results framework agreed upon from the outset to measure real impact on access, learning, and management.
What changed when we started measuring?
PROEMEM's results can be read across three dimensions: access, learning, and trajectories.
- In terms of access, the progress is striking. Early childhood education coverage grew from 26% to 33%, primary education coverage from 94% to 99%, and more than 10,000 new school places were created. Today, virtually every child in Manaus is in school — a remarkable achievement for the third largest education network in the country.
- In learning outcomes, the transformation is equally significant. The share of 5th-grade students reaching adequate levels in Portuguese doubled from 3 to 6 out of 10, and in Math grew from 2 to 5 out of 10. Pedagogical models such as Educa Mais Manaus — combining student support, digitized formative assessments, and continuous teacher training — were key to Manaus scoring 6.2 points on the 2023 IDEB, surpassing both the state of Amazonas average and the national average. It is the only capital in the Northern region to achieve that result.
- Finally, school trajectories also improved. The overage rate in primary school — the percentage of children enrolled in a grade below what corresponds to their age — fell from 21% to 9%, less than half of what it was. With 9,000 teachers trained in 2024 alone, far fewer students are repeating grades and far more are moving forward.
Two worlds, one shared commitment
As noted, one of Manaus's distinctive challenges is the diversity of its educational landscape. The city bridges realities that, in another country, could belong to entirely different nations.
In urban schools, the challenge is scale. Escola Presidente João Goulart, for example, runs two daily shifts across 20 classrooms, and features solar energy, a wastewater treatment system, and an air-conditioned cafeteria. The principal describes how the pedagogical monitoring system — with assessments every two weeks for 5th-grade students — makes it possible to pinpoint exactly which skills each student needs to strengthen.
In riverside communities, the challenge is simply reaching them. The Secretariat designed georeferenced school transport routes, identifying embarkation points and schedules according to the river's season. The boats have shallow-draft hulls to navigate low water. Without that logistics system, children like Uiranambi would simply never make it to class.
What connects both worlds is the same commitment: leaving no student behind, whether they live in a city neighborhood or in a community reachable only by boat
The Key: Measuring to Improve
A technical note produced by the IDB with Instituto IEDE — From the Alagoas Coast to the Amazon: Pathways to Transform Education Quality in Brazil — which analyzed best practices in Manaus by comparing it with Coruripe (Alagoas), the municipality with the best IDEB in Brazil among cities of 50,000 inhabitants, identifies a common pattern among the highest-performing networks: pedagogical coherence.
It's not just about having good assessments, or good teachers, or good infrastructure in isolation. It's the connection between all of these: assessments that feed into teacher training, training that improves classroom practice, and classroom practice that shows up in learning data. A self-reinforcing cycle.
In Manaus, that cycle was built with patience and evidence. The number of non-literate students fell from 18,000 to nearly 2,000 between the post-pandemic period and 2024. It wasn't magic — it was management. This project didn't just build schools: it helped more children be in the classroom, learn more, and advance in their studies. And that, at its core, is development effectiveness.
What Comes Next?
Manaus isn't stopping. Today we are accompanying the city in preparing PROEMEM II — a new cycle that once again bets on resilient infrastructure, better pedagogical practices, and stronger educational management. The priorities for 2026 include ensuring literacy at the right age, expanding full-day education, and strengthening equity: making sure that the gains also reach lower-income students, indigenous communities, and riverside populations.
Vinícius's mother knows exactly what she hopes for her son: "It is education that transforms. I fight every day so that it is through education that every child finds their place in society."
Uiranambi also knows her path. Her name means beija-flor — hummingbird — in Baré. And like the hummingbird, she has learned to fly between two worlds.
Watch these videos to see the stories of how this project improved the lives of students like Uiranambi and Vinícius.