Ministerial Meeting of Education ―Santiago 2024―

According to the first Regional Monitoring Report of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4), titled “The Crossroads of Education in Latin America and the Caribbean,” prepared by UNESCO, UNICEF, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), many indicators such as access, coverage, and completion, which had been progressing at a very significant pace since the beginning of this century, show signs of deceleration. 

Perhaps the most concerning finding of this report is the stagnation in learning achievements at the regional level. When comparing the results of the latest tests from the ERCE 2019 study (by the Latin American Laboratory for the Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE) of UNESCO) with the previous evaluation, the region, on average, did not show improvement in the areas of Reading, Mathematics, and Science, remaining at unsatisfactory achievement levels. In secondary education, for the ten Latin American countries participating in PISA in 2018, the results also show that the regional average, in the three evaluated areas, did not change compared to the previous measurement in 2015. Again, the percentage of students who reached the minimum levels of competence in reading (51%), mathematics (37%), and science (48%) are low. 

The achievement of SDG4 by 2030 was not assured even before the pandemic, and even less so after COVID-19 exacerbated educational inequalities and limited the right to education of the most vulnerable. The region experienced the longest disruption of face-to-face education in the world. Between February 2020 and March 2022, schools were completely closed for 33 weeks and partially closed for 37 weeks, affecting more than 170 million students and their families. 

Before this massive closure of schools, the percentage of the population that did not have access to primary and secondary education in Latin America and the Caribbean was estimated at 10.4 million children and young people. The effects of the pandemic have added greater fragility to educational trajectories, and increases in disengagement and educational dropout are projected, an effect that has been hidden during the years when education was organized in remote and hybrid formats and that now, with the normalization of face-to-face classes, is beginning to become more evident.