Despite large advances in school enrollment over the last decade, approximately 262 million children, adolescents, and youth between the ages of 6 and 17 are still out of school, according to UNESCO. In Latin America and elsewhere, school dropout is a key obstacle to universal school attendance: in the region, 15.5 percent of students dropped out during their time in primary school in 2016. Read More

The Latin America region suffers disproportionately from criminal violence. According to the Igarapé Institute’s Homicide Monitor, 16 out of the 20 countries with the highest homicide rates worldwide are located in the region. This includes Mexico, which has one of the highest homicide counts in the world—recording over 30,000 murders in 2017.

While much of this violence has been attributed to the rise of organized crime... Read More

Technology is increasingly opening up new and promising opportunities to improve educational achievement in schools. Governments in Latin America are investing significant resources to adopt education technologies, or ed tech, with the promise of improving learning outcomes. Some of these investments are not evidence-based and risk wasting public resources with ineffective approaches. Despite this, there is strong demand among some actors for data and evidence.

At J-PAL Latin America & the Caribbean... Read More