The educational goals of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development will not be met in Latin America and the Caribbean unless the direction of public policies is changed and greater resources are allocated. The warning has been launched this Thursday by Unicef, UNESCO and ECLAC in a joint report. In The crossroads of education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Regional monitoring report SDG4-Education 2030 They also denounce that the economic problems in the region and the covid-19 pandemic slowed down the educational achievements of recent years.
“Between 2015 and 2020, enrollment in pre-primary education (from zero to two years) increased by 2.1 million boys and girls, a faster pace than in previous years. However, since the beginning of the pandemic, we have observed how early childhood has not been prioritized, which puts these advances at risk. We urge governments to invest in early childhood so that no child is left behind,” said Rada Noeva, UNICEF deputy regional director for the region.
More than 10 million children without education
One of the great concerns of international organizations is those children without access to education, especially in rural and very impoverished areas. “It is estimated that in 2019, 10.4 million children and young people were excluded from access to primary and secondary education in Latin America and the Caribbean, and these figures are prior to the pandemic, whose effects add greater fragility to the trajectories that guarantee permanence in the educational system,” said Alberto Arenas de Mesa, director of Social Development at ECLAC.
The recent progress made at the secondary level is beginning to stall, the document also warns. Between 2015 and 2018, Latin American students did not manage to improve in the areas of reading, mathematics and science, something that had occurred between 2006 and 2013. Although year after year more and more students finish high school, the rate of improvement is has slowed down. In the period 2010-2015, the rate of students with completed secondary education improved by 6 percentage points, while between 2015 and 2020, the advance was 1.9 points.
The tertiary sector continues to be the most unequal. In the last twenty years, around 17 million new students have reached university, but the gap between countries and, within each of them, by gender and socioeconomic level has not stopped increasing. “The five countries with the highest enrollment rate in higher education increased access by eight points on average, while the five countries with the lowest indicators grew by one point on average between 2015 and 2020,” the text states. In the year 2000, men and women enrolled almost equally at university, but today the latter are the clear majority: 61.7% compared to 46.8% of men. In turn, living in a rural environment and in a low-income household makes it very difficult to reach higher education, since in recent years it has almost exclusively favored the middle and upper sectors.
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To correct such inequalities, Unicef, Unesco and ECLAC ask to increase investment in education instead of stopping reducing it. Since 2015, 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have cut their budget allocations for this sector and the situation has worsened even more with the crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic, which meant an economic contraction of 7.7% of the GDP.
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