- Education data in Latin America and the Caribbean are easier to explore with CIMA, the IDB’s Information Center for Learning Improvement and home to its Education Statistics Portal, bringing regional education data together in one place.
- CIMA provides more than 30 comparable education indicators across 26 countries, with country profiles, geospatial data, and visualizations to track progress, compare education systems, and identify gaps.
- CIMA connects education data with evidence on what works. A new evidence section draws on a rigorous review of more than 240,000 studies to help turn data into insights and move from diagnosis to action.
A number can be accurate and still tell an incomplete story. A student can be enrolled and not be learning. A school can exist and still be too far away to reach in practice. A national average, on its own, says little. Its meaning changes once you compare it with the rest of the region, track how it has evolved over time, or look at differences across territories.
Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen changed the way we understand poverty and development by questioning what happens when we look at a complex reality through a single lens. Income matters, but it isn't enough to understand a person's real opportunities. Something similar happens in education: the information we analyze partly determines which problems we're able to see.
Understanding the reality of education means looking at data together, comparing it, and putting it in context. Only then can it help us ask better questions and make more informed decisions. That's exactly what many of the world's highest-performing education systems have done: using data systematically to identify their challenges, track their progress, and learn from evidence to guide policy.
With that conviction, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) created the Information Center for the Improvement of Learning (CIMA) a decade ago. Its purpose was to bring together, in one place, education data on Latin America and the Caribbean from multiple sources, harmonize it to make it comparable, and make it easier to explore and use.
Since then, the education information landscape has changed. Today we have more data and evidence than ever, but we also face new questions that require connecting different dimensions of education systems and finding simpler ways to explore that information.
To meet this new reality, the IDB is relaunching CIMA: a free, open portal that connects data and evidence to offer a fuller picture of education across the region. In one place, it brings together more than 30 comparable indicators from 26 countries, country profiles, geospatial analysis, and evidence maps that help us understand what's happening, how education systems have evolved, where gaps persist, and what we know about the interventions that can help close them.
1. Different sources. Comparable data. A multidimensional view.
Household surveys, administrative records, and learning assessments reveal different dimensions of the education reality. CIMA gathers, reviews, harmonizes, and documents this information so that indicators can be tracked over time and compared across countries. That comparability and multidimensional lens have been part of CIMA's DNA from the start, and they still are.
In its new version, CIMA organizes more than 30 indicators into six dimensions: coverage, learning, physical resources, financial resources, efficiency, and geographic accessibility. Together, they make it possible to analyze how education systems work, how they've evolved, and where their main gaps and challenges lie.
2. Latin America and the Caribbean at the center.
CIMA is built specifically to help us understand education in the region. Rather than covering hundreds of countries and thousands of indicators, it selects and organizes key information on the education systems of 26 countries, their trajectories, and their gaps. That focus makes it easier to identify each country's main challenges and provides information to guide strategies that expand educational opportunities for all students.
3. Rigorous data that doesn't require an instruction manual.
All the technical work happens behind the scenes. The idea is still that you shouldn't need to be a data specialist to explore CIMA: comparing countries, following trends, or spotting gaps should take a few clicks, not hours spent hunting down databases, reviewing methodologies, and trying to make them comparable.
Until now, entering CIMA meant starting with an indicator. That option is still there — now with more ways to visualize the data, including maps — but there's a new path too: starting with a country.
The new country profiles bring together each country's main indicators and let you quickly see where it stands, how it has changed, and how it compares with Latin America and the Caribbean and with other international benchmarks. Explore the educational indicators and key data from the education system by country here.
Explore the educational indicators and key data from the education system in Uruguay.
CIMA adds a new dimension: geographic accessibility. The new indicators show where educational opportunities are located, how far they are from students, and how access changes depending on the territory and socioeconomic conditions. In this example, the Map view displays the latest available attendance rates by age group across Latin America and the Caribbean, making it easy to compare countries at a glance.
Explore the data your way. Switch between Bars, Trend, Map, and Table views, and use the filters to select countries, age groups, and available disaggregations. You can also move between country and regional perspectives for different levels of analysis. You can also export the data or chart for further analysis, reports, or presentations. Learn more here.
Percentage of people in a given age group who attend an educational institution, relative to the total population of that same age group.
Identifying a learning, dropout, or access gap is essential, but it's only the first step. The next question is what can be done about it: which policies and interventions have been evaluated, what results they've produced, and how strong the available evidence is.
Drawing on a review of more than 240,000 studies, CIMA rigorously selects and synthesizes the available evidence on different education interventions. Its evidence maps make it possible to identify which interventions have been evaluated, what results they've achieved, how large their effects are, and how strong the evidence behind them is.
Explore the evidence on what works to prevent violence against girls in schools. Through an interactive analysis, the Evidence Map helps identify what works, the Evidence Gap Map shows where research gaps exist, and the Heat Map shows which countries the analyzed evidence comes from. Learn more here.
Explore the evidence on what works to prevent violence against girls in schools.
Understanding what's happening in our education systems is essential to expanding educational opportunities. Latin America and the Caribbean can learn as a region by comparing trajectories, recognizing progress, identifying shared challenges, and drawing on other countries' experience.
Having more data is only the beginning. Its real value lies in connecting it, putting it in context, and combining it with evidence to guide better decisions and strengthen learning.
No single number tells the whole story. CIMA helps us see all the pieces together.
