Challenges for Providing Quality Education in Central America: Lessons from the Achievements of the Past Four Decades

This chapter surveys the field of international educational development from 1990 until the present and reviews the past 40 years of trends in education dissemination and universalisation in Latin America and the Caribbean. To provide an overview of the state of education in the region, this review uses the principal educational statistics and indicators commonly employed by UNESCO and the World Bank, which include gross and net enrolment rates, grade repetition rates, dropout rates, completion rates and the gender equality index, which measures the education gender gap. We also examine the characteristics of the data, which are derived from cross-sectional data. Subsequently, we present the challenges that Latin America and the Caribbean must address to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4, which has a target attainment date of 2030. These challenges include out-of-school children, dropouts, poor learning outcomes, disparities within Latin America and the Caribbean, and the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this chapter introduces the development of new cohort models by the Global Education Monitoring Report teams and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 2022 and considers its effectiveness and possibilities.