**Keynote speech delivered during the Lemann Foundation UNGA 2023 Side event “Eradicating Illiteracy in Brazilian Schools: Lessons for the Global South.” Let me start by talking about an enormous problem—and then about an enormous opportunity to solve it. Before the pandemic, in 2018, the OECD published a truly shocking report about social mobility. It looked at how long … [Read more...] about Investment in Human Capital: The Path for Brazil, Latin America, and the Caribbean
Educational systems
School Feeding: Latin America and The Caribbean Opportunity to Boost Learning Outcomes
School feeding programs support children's health, nutrition, and education across Latin America and the Caribbean. When COVID-19 closed schools in 2020, these programs adapted by shifting to take-home rations, ensuring 80.3 million children continued receiving meals. As schools reopen, integrated approaches are needed to get kids back on track. In 2023, the IDB Education … [Read more...] about School Feeding: Latin America and The Caribbean Opportunity to Boost Learning Outcomes
COVID-19 learning losses in Latin America might not be as catastrophic as some predict
Policymakers in the education systems of Latin America are bracing themselves for what they expect will be unwelcome news. Following the devastating impact on schooling of the COVID-19 pandemic, they are looking ahead with some trepidation to the results from the latest round of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that will be released at the end of … [Read more...] about COVID-19 learning losses in Latin America might not be as catastrophic as some predict
From the Printing Press to ChatGPT: The Challenge Does Not Lie in Technology but in Education Inequality
Let us reflect on two dates. The first one is 1440: the approximate year in which Gutenberg invented the printing press. The second one is 2022: the year in which OpenAI launched ChatGPT, technology capable of generating language, which by January 2023 already had more than one hundred million users. The world was not and is not the same before and after those two … [Read more...] about From the Printing Press to ChatGPT: The Challenge Does Not Lie in Technology but in Education Inequality
Prioritizing Well-Being in Schools: Coschool’s Recipe for Education with Emotion
What is the main challenge facing educators in a post-pandemic context? Academic results? An increase in bullying? Student desertion? These are all recurring concerns. Nevertheless, one overarching challenge is a root cause that intersects all the aforementioned. In 2022, Coschool, an IDB 21st Century Skills Coalition member, asked this question to over 200 educators from rural … [Read more...] about Prioritizing Well-Being in Schools: Coschool’s Recipe for Education with Emotion