Learnings from the Amazon: Innovative Strategies to Transform Education

Twenty-five years ago, in a place like Pomeroon in Guyana, children took about 3 hours to reach school. Today, many of the 12 million girls, boys, and adolescents living in the 8 countries of the Amazon still face similar challenges. Moreover, these issues are not unique to the Amazon but also occur in other countries in the region. Today, students like Alejandra Santiago Da Silva from Amazonas in Brazil or Blanca González from Honduras traverse long and difficult paths to access education.

What solutions can we offer them? What policies are necessary for children and young people motivated to learn like Alejandra and Blanca?

In the 2024 Regional Policy Dialogue of the IDB, we brought together educational authorities from across the region in Belem do Pará under the title ‘Learnings from the Amazon’ to join forces and learn from the Amazon region: today, the Amazon is in a position to showcase implemented solutions that are innovative and effective in improving educational opportunities for its students in highly adverse conditions.

Amazon, Latin America, and the Caribbean: What Are the Threats to Education?

Nine out of ten children today in Latin America and the Caribbean live in areas with a high risk of facing at least two types of climate threats. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew in Haiti affected more than 300 schools, and over 100,000 students missed classes. In 2021, Hurricanes Eta and Iota in Honduras and Guatemala destroyed over 1,000 schools, and 700 had to be closed because they were turned into shelters. In 2023, due to the drought in Mexico, both the school day and the academic year were shortened due to the lack of water supply in schools. And just a few months ago, 173,000 students were left without a return date to school due to flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Climate change and rising temperatures impact the length of the school day, the cancellation of classes, and students’ concentration.

The report ‘Education in the Amazon Region’ presents important data on the educational consequences in terms of both access and learning. While, on average, 69% of young people in Latin America and the Caribbean finish secondary school, only 54% in the Amazon region manage to graduate (a difference of 15 percentage points).

Completion Rates, Primary and Secondary Education: 6 National Averages vs. Amazon Region vs. Amazon Rural Areas (8 Countries), circa 2022

Students with adequate levels of learning in mathematics and reading in primary education, according to results from national standardized tests

In terms of learning, not only is the region, on average, about five years behind OECD countries according to the latest PISA tests, but there is also a profound inequity that pervades educational systems. Poorer students perform worse than wealthier ones (33 percentage points difference in PISA), and the Amazon performs worse than non-Amazon regions (a 17 percentage point difference in national learning assessments).

What are the causes of low access and poor quality of education?

Firstly, greater distances and travel times: children in the Amazon region take longer to reach school. 29% of the population aged 10 to 19 lives more than 5 km from the nearest secondary school. They also have worse school infrastructure, facing more difficulties accessing basic services such as electricity, bathroom availability, and less significant connectivity. Moreover, children in these schools have access to less qualified teachers. For example, in Brazil, while most schools with indigenous children have teachers with a medium level of education, almost all teachers in other schools have completed higher education.

What are the Amazon’s solutions for Latin America and the Caribbean?

Despite the significant challenges, the Amazon has numerous effective examples for improving educational services in hard-to-reach areas. The first goal is to increase the percentage of students who attend school and complete secondary education. The second is to ensure that those students who attend regularly and graduate have learned and acquired the skills that will benefit them both in life and work. To achieve these goals, we present some strategies:

• Bringing the School Closer to the Student. This means addressing access issues by shortening distances and travel times. Data is fundamental for this. For example, the open-source UrbanPy platform allows for the identification of population concentrations in cities and isolated communities to estimate the number of students and their ages per 0.7 km². This is key for planning school infrastructure and transportation.

• Resilient Infrastructure. If school construction incorporates risk mitigation measures, each $1 invested can generate up to $11 in savings for new construction and $4 when rehabilitating existing infrastructure.

• Meaningful Connectivity. Meaningful connectivity means not just connecting more places or transforming the school to have more access to connectivity, but enabling teachers and students to use this service. For example, through satellite systems and television channels, specialized teachers can connect with local tutors to provide quality education to more than 30,000 students annually in 60 municipalities in Amazonas in hard-to-reach regions. When the entire educational community is involved in the goal of not only digitalizing the school but also using it for learning, minimum access standards for all students in terms of broadband connection, speed, and devices can be established, transitioning from simple connectivity to meaningful connectivity. In this shift, teachers play a key role. When diagnostic tools (such as the Edutec Guide) are applied and investments are made in training and professional development, 60% of teachers can improve their digital skills within 6 months.

• Teachers. The goal is to focus on learning to reduce the average number of students with low performance. We know that recruiting and attracting the best teachers to the most vulnerable schools through a centralized assignment system can improve learning by up to a third of the school year.

• Bilingual Intercultural Education. When culturally adapted specific learning programs are developed, there can be a 50% increase in the performance of indigenous children in mathematics programs. This is the case with the JADENKÄ program, which teaches both traditional basic math skills and ethnomathematics early on.

• Accelerated Learning. Given existing gaps, implementing programs that allow students to learn at an accelerated pace is required. Evidence indicates that students learn 30% faster with remote tutoring. Also, programs like “Aprendamos todos a leer” can improve reading skills by 30%. For STEM skill development, with inquiry-based and problem-solving approaches, students can improve by up to 2 academic years during the program’s implementation.

• Relevant and Purposeful Learning. Schools need to ignite students’ intrinsic motivation. When it’s so challenging to get to school each day, it must be worth it, meaning the ultimate goal must be very compelling. Therefore, throughout the region, but particularly for the most vulnerable students and the hardest-to-reach areas, schools need to connect with students’ future economic opportunities. Schools have a central role in bridging them to the world of work. Evidence shows that when curricula and training provided in educational institutions are connected to demand and aligned with local economic needs, vocational training program dropout rates can be reduced by up to 21%.

Want to learn more? We invite you to watch the full event “Learnings from the Amazon: Innovative Strategies to Transform Education in Latin America and the Caribbean.”