Chile is Preparing for a Major Summit on the Education Crisis
On January 24-25, 2024, the “Ministers of Education Meeting: Santiago 2024” an extraordinary summit of the Ministers of Education from Latin America and the Caribbean, will be held in the capital of Chile, Santiago. The summit, orchestrated in Chile, is a collaborative effort involving the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF) BANK, the World Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and UNICEF. It is slated to host the presence of education ministers from across Latin America, alongside representatives from 33 countries in the region. Notably, key participants include Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Paraguay. These countries collectively support approximately 125 million students and 6.9 million teachers. The summit aims to make progress in defining public policies focused on reactivating, improving, and transforming education as accelerators of the educational goals of the 2030 Agenda. Its main aim is to suggest a practical agenda, combining political and technical measures, to navigate the post-pandemic education crisis. The event will address public policies for reactivating, recovering, and transforming education as accelerators of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) and will involve an exchange of experiences. Furthermore, discussions will cover the financing of education as a facilitating factor, emphasizing the need to renew the global commitment to education as a public good within the parameters of existing obligations. The summit call to experts in Latin American countries highlights the importance of this summit for solving the crisis that has severely affected more than 170 million students in the region, considered one of the most unequal in the world, causing them to lose approximately 1,5 years of schooling. The summit is particularly significant as it will impact 33 Ministries of Education serving the needs of approximately 125 million students and 6.9 million teachers in the region. Following the summit, progress is expected in defining public policies for fundamental learning in the Latin American region, especially considering that, according to the latest results of the 2022 PISA tests, three out of four students in the region did not reach the minimum competencies in Mathematics, and more than half lack basic skills in Reading and Science.