Obtaining new credentials is a common strategy for workers looking to reskill in advance of a career change or re-employment following a layoff. Increasingly, individuals are seeking credentials, such as certificates, certifications, and badges, in order to maximize their marketability to employers or advance within their current position.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused nearly 15 million excess deaths across the globe. Although mortality rates are lowest among children and youth, the young face another emergency: the learning crisis.
Traditional degrees take years and often thousands of dollars to acquire—and they sometimes fail to prepare students for the workplace. They are costly for individuals, their families, companies, and society, in terms of both direct outlays and opportunity costs. Recognizing the high cost of a post-secondary degree, both students and employers are looking for more pertinent, shorter, less expensive, non-degree, alternative credentials (such as certifications and certificates) as both complements and alternatives to traditional degrees.
Although youth tend to have milder symptoms from the COVID-19 virus, the pandemic has brought unprecedented changes and challenges into their lives and particularly their mental health. Pandemic-related school closures have disrupted their learning and isolated them from peers.
The COVID-19 pandemic widened pre-existing opportunity, skills, and achievement gaps, with devastating impacts on our future generations. It has been more than two years and a half since the pandemic has changed the lives of165 million students in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), who, on average, lost 237 days of schooland faced tremendous learning losses.
The issue of education financing must be discussed and included in the public agenda because inaction or inertia will not mean preservation of the status quo but greater exclusion and deterioration of the social and productive fabric
When schools worldwide began shifting from face-to-face to virtual classrooms due to the pandemic, educators were forced to rethink and redesign their learning environments – essentially overnight. While technology in schools had been rising for years, few teachers had extensive experience in conducting learning in a mostly online environment.
Over the years, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Bank-financed projects’ ability to conduct in-person supervision has become significantly hindered in Haiti. Indeed, the education sector has noticed that children are not attending schools due to dangers associated with movement, school constructions are delayed due to materials and people unable to pass through gang-controlled areas, and services to schools such as the delivery of goods and services are hindered due to generalized insecurity.
We know that the key to innovation for any of the challenges faced by Latin America and the Caribbean today is collaboration among diverse actors and the exchange of experiences, and the development and education of the youngest children is no exception.
The IDB calls on the public and private sectors to take action and invest in education to address the region’s learning crisis and its aggravation by the COVID-19 pandemic