The Education Statistics Portal is the first website available in Spanish, English and Portuguese to contain comparable indicators and statistics for Latin America and the Caribbean

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has launched CIMA, a website with education and statistics indicators for Latin America and the Caribbean that seeks to address the needs of policy makers, researchers, media, and civil society to monitor education systems in the region and inform the policies that contribute to their improvement.

While similar data-collection efforts from other organizations already exist, CIMA offers an intuitive and easy to use platform with information available in Spanish, English and Portuguese that is comparable and relevant for the challenges faced by countries in the region.

CIMA centralizes data from three main sources: harmonized household surveys, learning assessments and administrative data. It currently contains close to 40 indicators that altogether provide a regional education outlook and allow comparisons between countries and years. Users can also browse indicators by accessing the country profiles that explore in detail specific characteristics of each system. These different approaches allow identifying areas in which systems have made progress and those that still require attention, contributing in the process of setting goals for the provision of educational services at the national and regional levels.

“CIMA provides evidence to support informed decision-making that improves the quality of our education systems as well as student learning. We are convinced that, with more knowledge about what our students know and can do, we will be able to ensure that all of them reach the top” said Emiliana Vegas, Chief of the Education Division at the IDB, who also added that CIMA is more than a statistics portal and should be seen as a holistic project to guide education policies and objectives.

In this regard, CIMA hopes to encourage countries to strengthen their data collection and analysis systems, participate in regional and international learning assessments, and evaluate the impact of their education reforms. In this manner, they will generate more useful and high-quality information that can be used in policy making. To achieve this goal, CIMA aims at creating a regional network with active participation from the ministries, evaluation agencies and statistics centers to generate and take advantage of quality education data.

To start browsing CIMA and learn more about the project, visit www.iadb.org/CIMA.