According to a report issued by the World Bank and UNICEF, in collaboration with UNICEF, four in five sith graders in Latin America and the Caribbean are expected to lack basic reading comprehension proficiency. Prior to the pandemic, the region was already in a learning crisis. This represents a substantial increase and suggests that the two years of Covid school closures may have set learning outcomes back by more than a decade.

Children in the region experienced some of the longest school closures in the world. On average, students lost two-thirds of all in-person school days since the start of the pandemic, with an estimated loss of 1.5 years of learning, says the World Bank.

“The fact that a large majority of sixth graders may not be able to understand what they read, jeopardizes the future well-being of millions of children who have not developed critical foundational skills, which increases the risks to deepen the already long-standing inequities in the region,” said World Bank Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean, Carlos Felipe Jaramillo.

The latest data shows the younger and more vulnerable children have been disproportionately affected by the loss of learning, adding to fears of increased inequality and a generational crisis. The education crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean is reportedly the second worst globally. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region that has a higher rate of learning poverty, with about 9 out of 10 students unable to read and understand simple text by the end of primary education.

Image from UNICEF