Chile will host a meeting of Latin American education ministers on the post-pandemic

Chili will host on January 25 and 26 the extraordinary meeting of ministers of Education of Latin America and the Caribbean, ‘Ministerial of Education: Santiago 2024’which will seek to propose concrete actions to overcome the educational crisis left by the pandemic in the region.

“Efforts must be redoubled so that educational recovery and transformation are at the center of the political and social agenda,” said the director of the Regional Office of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO) in Santiago, Claudia Uribe, through a statement.

The Minister of Education of Chile, Nicolás Cataldo, for his part, pointed out that at the meeting, which will take place in Santiago, experiences of educational policies and financing will be exchanged “to advance (towards the 2030 Agenda) in the reactivation, recovery and transformation educational”, and thus face the regional challenges derived from the impact of prolonged crises such as the pandemic.

The meeting, convened by UNESCO and the Ministry of Education of Chile and co-organized with the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean-CAF, the World Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Fund The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) will influence 33 ministries of Education that serve the needs of approximately 125 million students and 6.9 million teachers, says a statement released by UNESCO.

“The fact that millions of girls and boys are still deprived of quality and decent education is unacceptable. To achieve this, it is not only necessary to invest more resources in education, but also to work efficiently to achieve this objective,” highlighted Jaime Saavedra, director of Human Development for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank.

Among the countries that have already confirmed their attendance are Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, among others, and in addition to the respective ministers of the Education portfolio, authorities and financial experts will also participate.

The macro-event is taking place in the midst of the greatest educational crisis in the last 100 years, states the UNESCO note, because the impact of the pandemic has been especially serious in Latin America, one of the most unequal regions in the world: it affected more than 170 million students throughout the region, who have lost an average of 1.5 years of schooling.

Furthermore, school exclusion and deficits in learning basic skills and competencies have not been resolved despite the efforts of the different countries in the region.

The ministerial meeting is part of the follow-up to the United Nations Education Transformation Summit, in which efforts were established to overcome the educational crisis derived from Covid-19 and rethink the educational systems of the future.