Enfoque Educación

School dropout, a persistent problem in Latin America and the Caribbean that will worsen

Jaewon Cho is a programme officer and Benjamin Riley is a consultant at the Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS). KERIS is a public institution under the Korean Ministry of Education that promotes national and global initiatives and policy support related to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education ranging from kindergarten to higher education.

The lockdown for such a long period of time has already begun to negatively impact our region’s children. A survey by the Colombian Institute of Neurosciences found that in Colombia, 88% of children have signs that indicate that their mental health and behavior have been negatively affected by the lockdown, and 42% show signs related to the development of academic skills .

Global education and training expenditure is a more than 6 trillion industry. Estimates say that education expenditure will grow to $10T by 2030, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors. Compared to other industries, EdTech represents a very small portion of the global education market: less than 3% is digital spend (HolonIQ), which means there is still a lot of room for growth in the coming years.

Entry by Marcelo Pérez-Alfaro, Pablo Zoido y Gonzalo Muñoz.

Tara García Mathewson is a staff writer at The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Her work has focused on education, immigration, public housing, and community news. She is also a special guest in our blog series about the development of #skills21 in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The majority of students lack the motivation they need to stay on task from home

Entry by Juan M. Hernández-Agramonte (IPA), Claudia Paola Lisboa Vásquez (OSEE, Minedu), Carolina Méndez (BID), Olga Namen (IPA), Emma Näslund-Hadley (BID), y Luciana Velarde (OSEE, Minedu)

Following school and workplace closures and layoffs throughout the world, mental health experts caution that lengthy shelter-in-place orders may have severe effects on our physical and socioemotional wellbeing. With all of us separated from friends, everyday interactions with other people, routines, and structures, struggles with loneliness, anxiety and depression are rising.

Marie Lou Papazian is CEO and Pegor Papazian is Chief Development Officer at the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, an innovative learning program at the intersection of technology and design. Created in Armenia, TUMO has now expanded to Paris, Beirut, Berlin, Moscow, Tirana and Kiev.

Entry by Emma Naslund-Hadley and Juan Manuel Hernández-Agramonte

Images are powerful, even mental images. If you cannot imagine yourself doing something, the odds that you will do it drops. International research that asks students to draw mathematicians and scientists, reveal that both boys and girls tend to picture them as male and white.

The social isolation caused by school closures due to COVID-19 could have devastating consequences for children and adolescents and puts their mental health and their socio-emotional and cognitive development at risk.