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Latin America鈥檚 Empty Classrooms

By Cecily Fasanella and Greg Ross

COVID-19 disrupted schooling around the world, but nowhere as much as in Latin America, where prolonged closures were the norm and remote learning often rudimentary. In 2020, the region鈥檚 students missed an average of 170 days of school, over four times the world average. Globally, 14 countries have kept schools almost entirely closed to in-person learning since March 2020. Of those, nine are in Latin America, where 98 million did not set foot in a classroom for most of the past year.

School closures were particularly disruptive in Latin America, where internet access varies widely across the region. Chile and Costa Rica are not far behind the United States in internet use, with 82 percent of Chileans and 81 percent of Costa Ricans online compared to  of the U.S. population. But internet use is less common in places like Honduras and Nicaragua, where less than half of the population has access. Those inequities have left many students in low-income households without any live instruction, their lessons recorded and broadcast on TV or radio. In late 2020, of children in Latin America鈥檚 poorest households were not receiving any education at all. Worse still, shuttered schools deprived many students of meals; of the region鈥檚 190 million children, 85 million participate in a school nutrition program. School closures also left students vulnerable to recruitment by criminal organizations. In Colombia, for example, five times more minors were recruited by gangs during the first six months of 2020 than the.

Even as vaccines roll out in Latin America and schools reopen, the region will suffer the effects of this unprecedented educational interruption. Economists that the pandemic could lower the number of Latin American students who finish high school from 61 percent to 46 percent in the coming years. school-age children in Latin America may never return to school at all, according to UNESCO.

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