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
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 of 165 million students in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), who, on average, lost 237 days of school and faced tremendous learning losses.
During the third quarter of the twentieth century, many Latin American countries made a great effort to expand the coverage of their education systems. The progress, albeit important, was insufficient and uneven and was interrupted by the crisis of the end of the 1970s: output fell in almost all the continent, unemployment skyrocketed and countries were hit by hyperinflation.
Over the last several years, Haiti has been rife with ongoing political and social unrest (including a national lockdown period called Peyi-Lok), skyrocketing levels of unemployment, natural disasters including devastating hurricanes and earthquakes, the COVID-19 health crisis, and a tragic presidential assassination. In the midst of these challenges, the schooling of children in Haiti has suffered from numerous delays and extended interruptions to the academic year.
In a joint investment with the World Bank, the IDB successfully financed the first year of full implementation of the Education Management and Information System (EMIS), setting up the first pieces of a robust foundation for the collection and management of the education data in Haiti.
Establishing a formal education management information system for a country is hard. Doing so in socio-political unrest, changes in government, and natural disasters is even more challenging.