Education ministers and government representatives from Latin America and the Caribbean reaffirmed their commitment to promote urgent educational recovery in the region after the losses recorded during the pandemic and to guarantee basic learning for all children. Despite significant efforts by governments, teachers and parents, children have lost, on average, 1.5 years of learning during the pandemic. 

After two years of school closures in the region, learning outcomes could have been set back more than ten years. The youngest and poorest have been hardest hit. Preliminary evidence from several countries shows greater losses at the primary than at the secondary level and among students at the lowest socioeconomic levels. Collective learning losses will hurt Latin America and the Caribbean in the future, exacerbating inequalities and jeopardizing economic growth.

This meeting is part of the initiatives under the Commitment to action on basic learning and its recovery, an official mechanism promoted globally by the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO, USAID, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and more recently, in Latin America and the Caribbean, by the IDB, the Inter-American Dialogue and the Secretariat of Education of Bogota. Its purpose is to get governments and the education community to implement actions to ensure, at the highest political level, that all the world's children achieve basic learning, and complements a regional commitment launched last year to protect and restore learning.