SANTIAGO, Chile –The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) is urging regional countries to urgently address the “silent crisis” in education to avert what it describes as “the risk of a lost generation.”
ECLAC said despite the slight decline recorded in 2021, projections indicate that poverty and extreme poverty rates remain above pre-pandemic levels in 2022 in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).
In its latest publication titled “Social Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean 2022” that addresses education as a central issue along with its role in the debate on policies for the region’s recovery, ECLAC said “after a sharp increase in poverty and a slight increase in income inequality in 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the extreme poverty and poverty rates declined in 2021 and the middle-income strata grew but not by enough to fully reverse the negative effects of the pandemic”.
The publication projects that 201 million people or 32.1 percent of the region’s total population, live in situations of poverty, with 82 million (13.1 percent) of them in extreme poverty, “which points to a slight decline in overall poverty and a slight increase in extreme poverty versus 2021, due to the combined effects of economic growth, labor market dynamics and inflation.
“These figures mean that an additional 15 million people will be living in poverty in comparison with the situation before the pandemic and that there will be 12 million more people in extreme poverty than there were in 2019,” the Social Panorama 2022 report states,, adding “the extreme poverty levels projected for 2022 represent a 25-year setback for the region”.
As in past years, the report indicates that the incidence of poverty is greater in some population groups in the region.
It notes that more than 45 percent of the child and adolescent population lives in poverty, and that the poverty rate of women from 20 to 59 years of age is higher than that of men in all of the region’s countries.
Similarly, the report states poverty is considerably higher in the indigenous and Afro-descendent populations.
In 2021, income inequality, as measured by the Gini index, declined slightly versus 2020 in the region, reaching 0.458, which was similar to 2019 levels.
Meanwhile, the unemployment projected for 2022 represents a setback of 22 years, particularly affecting women, whose unemployment is seen rising from 9.5 percent in 2019 to 11.6 percent in 2022.
“The cascade of external shocks, the deceleration of economic growth, the weak recovery in employment and rising inflation are deepening and prolonging the social crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean,” said José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, ECLAC’s executive secretary as he presented the report.
“We have not been able to reverse the pandemic’s effects on poverty and extreme poverty, and countries face a silent crisis in education that is affecting the new generations’ future,” he warned, calling on regional countries to “invest decidedly in education and to turn this crisis into an opportunity for transforming educational systems.”
The report notes that Latin America and the Caribbean experienced the longest educational blackout worldwide, with an average shutdown of educational establishments of 70 weeks, versus 41 weeks in the rest of the world.
It said this “exacerbated pre-existing inequalities related to access, inclusion and educational quality.”
In this period, the report says one of the main limitations on educational continuity was unequal access to connectivity, equipment and digital skills.
In 2021, in 8 out of 12 regional countries, more than 60 percent of the poor population under 18 years of age, had no connectivity in their household and the report warns that, if action is not taken now, there would be “the risk of permanent scarring in the educational and labor trajectories of the youngest generations in the region.”
The document said “learning losses in the Caribbean have already been measured”, and that, in Latin America, studies and paid work for young people, 18 to 24 years of age, increased from 22.3 percent in 2019 to 28.7 percent in 2020, especially affecting young women.
In addition, the reports states that significant gender gaps persist in terms of performance and areas of education and that female students have poorer performances on average in mathematics and science during basic education, with deeper disparities in the lowest income quartiles.
Furthermore, in the majority of regional countries, the report says the proportion of female graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields does not exceed 40 percent.
Despite the progress made in recent decades on access and educational inclusion at all levels, from early childhood to higher education, the report said regional countries still had serious pending issues in terms of educational equality and quality prior to the crisis, prompted by the pandemic, “which were already hampering efforts to achieve the targets of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 by the year 2030.”
In line with the United Nations’ Transforming Education Summit held this year, the document provides numerous policy recommendations “to turn this crisis into an opportunity for transformation.”
“The social institutional framework is a critical factor for the effectiveness of social policies and is a cross-cutting element for achieving inclusive social development” according to the report, noting that s social spending by the central government reached 13 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021 in Latin America, “below the level seen in 2020 but far above what had been recorded in the last two decades.”
In the Caribbean, social spending reached 14.1 percent of GDP in 2021, “marking a historic high”.
In 2021, the report says education spending amounted to 4.1 percent of GDP (30.5 percent of total social spending) in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“We are facing a cascade of crises that has exacerbated the region’s inequalities and shortfalls,” said Salazar-Xirinachs, adding “this is not a time for gradual changes but instead for transformative and ambitious policies”.
