By: Staff Writer
August 23, 2022
The World Bank said that school closures during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic were longer in the Central American countries compared to the Caribbean countries, but “emergency measures” needed to address the learning gaps.
The WB in their special report, “My Education, My Future,” detailed some of the challenges Caribbean and Central American countries faced during the two year height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the glaring challenges was the need to address the school closures. The report said: “The School Closure Index, which measures the intensity of the school closure in LAC countries, shows that, on average, countries in Central America (including Mexico) were the ones to suffer the longest school closure spells, and countries in the Caribbean the ones to suffer the shortest, with countries in South America being somewhere in between. In fact, 5 of the top 10 countries of the School Closure Index – Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama– are located in Central America, whereas only 2 of the 10 countries with the shortest school closures – Nicaragua and Uruguay – are not located in the Caribbean.”
The report added: “As was shown, the majority of small island states in the Caribbean were the ones to close less and/ or reopen earlier, arguably due to their insular situation, which gave them an edge in terms of border closing and virus spread. Still, some specific Caribbean islands like The Bahamas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands were among the top 15 countries with longest spells of school closures. The massive and pervasive school closures have been heterogenous in nature, not only across countries but similarly within.”
The education crisis is expected to be felt within the next 5 to 10 years when many of the school age children that were supposed to graduate in 2020-2021 have to enter the workforce and are undertrained and underskilled and have little to no access to be retrained because they were forced to miss out two crucial years of the tenure in highschool.
Government’s region-wide had to become radical in their approach in dealing with these challenges and one of these radical approaches was to introduce remedial measures for children. Particularly in the Caribbean, remedial measures with a special focus on students in upper secondary with a certification examination; remedial measures to reduce student learning gaps in primary and lower secondary education; and remedial measures with a special focus on students who were unable to access distance learning in primary education.
The report also noted vaccination rates across the region and said, “As of the end of April 2022, 68 percent of the population in the region has been fully vaccinated6, and an extra 9 percent partially vaccinated against COVID-19.
Compared to other regions, vaccination rates were low at the start of the pandemic, but greatly increased during the last year to have a larger share of the population vaccinated. Most importantly, however, average regional vaccination conceal a large variation among countries.
While countries like Chile and Cuba – with 91 and 88 percent of people fully vaccinated, respectively – are atop of the regional ranking, countries like Haiti – with one percent of its population vaccinated – and Jamaica – 23 percent – are very far be- hind.7 In general, vaccination rates in LAC show that larger countries in the South America sub-region have been more successful in acquiring vaccines and vaccinating its population when compared to countries in the Caribbean.