A Shared Roadmap for Education: Five Proposals for Latin America and the Caribbean
In this blogpost, which is part of NORRAG’s blog series on “Financing Education”, Mariana Huepe outlines the inter-agency agreement—uniting UN agencies, development banks, and civil society—on key proposals to improve education financing.
Education is both a fundamental human right and a strategic investment for development. It underpins the exercise of other rights and is a public good that generates broad individual and collective benefits: higher incomes, productivity, innovation, and economic growth; reduced poverty and inequality; greater mobility and social cohesion; stronger democracies; increased fiscal revenues; and improved capacity to address climate change, among others (Huepe, 2024; UNESCO, 2024).
Despite these benefits, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) still face serious challenges in educational inclusion and quality. Progress in coverage over recent decades has been uneven, with deep gaps remaining —particularly in pre-primary, secondary, and tertiary education—linked to gender, territory, and ethno-racial status, among other factors. In 2022, almost 30% of young people aged 20–24 had not completed secondary school, with a gap of more than 35 percentage points between youth from the richest and poorest households (ECLAC, 2024)
Moreover, in the region, being in school does not guarantee learning. PISA 2022 results show that three out of four 15-year-olds in participating LAC countries do not achieve basic proficiency in mathematics. While the rate is higher among low-income students (88%), it remains high even among the wealthiest (55%), underscoring the systemic nature of the learning crisis.
Addressing these gaps requires efficient, equitable, and financially sustainable investment to implement medium-term policies that strengthen the capacity of education systems to offer real learning opportunities for all.
Investment gaps and urgent needs
On average, LAC countries meet at least one of the Incheon Declaration’s minimum investment thresholds: 4%–6% of GDP or 15%–20% of total public spending. However, 12 of 30 countries with available data fell short on both[i]. Public investment per student is about five times lower than in OECD countries (Huepe, 2024), and even when adjusting for GDP per capita, OECD countries still invest 1.4 times more at each education level[ii]. This highlights that, even after accounting for differences in economic capacity, LAC continues to lag significantly in its investment effort, which, along with the double educational challenge of inclusion and quality, underscores the urgency of substantially and sustainably increasing education financing.
A regional commitment: Five key proposals
Recognizing that financing is a precondition for recovery, revitalization, and transformation of education systems, LAC ministers of education adopted the Declaration of Santiago 2024, which called for the creation of an inter-agency working group (ECLAC, UNESCO, IIEP-UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, IDB, CAF, CLADE) to design a regional strategy for sustainable, equitable, and efficient education investment.
The group’s five proposals are:
- Expand fiscal space for education
Underinvestment in education increases the financial burden on households and deepens educational inequalities. Without additional and sustained resources, it will be impossible to close inclusion and quality gaps.
Proposal: Expand fiscal space for education to strengthen the financial sustainability of investments through, among other actions, progressive tax reforms and measures to tackle high levels of tax evasion; prioritizing education in public budgets; and improving the efficiency of education spending (proposal 3).
- Establish a minimum per-student investment standard
The cost of providing quality education varies widely across contexts, especially in rural or disadvantaged areas where infrastructure, transportation, and connectivity needs are greater. Without a guaranteed minimum, inequities in resources will persist.
Proposal: Define a minimum per-student investment standard based on the real cost of provision, covering teacher remuneration, materials, infrastructure, transportation, and connectivity, among other factors. Apply equity lens so that the standard sets a common floor while allowing differentiated allocations according to the specific needs of each territory or population.
- Strengthen costing, monitoring, evaluation, and accountability systems
Weak information systems hinder the ability to ensure that resources are used efficiently, equitably, and sustainably. Many countries lack accurate, timely, and disaggregated data linking investments to learning outcomes.
Proposal: Strengthen costing, monitoring, evaluation, and accountability systems, while strengthening or building robust education management information systems (EMIS) that track both resource use and its impact. Reinforce ministries’ technical, operational, political, and prospective capabilities (ECLAC, 2024) and encourage active civil society participation in monitoring education spending to improve transparency and promote evidence-based policymaking.
- Ensure intersectoral resource mobilization
Educational outcomes are shaped by factors beyond the classroom, including social protection, health, transport, infrastructure, and care services (Huepe, Palma and Trucco, 2022). Weak coordination across sectors limits students’ ability to access and complete schooling.
Proposal: Integrate education policies with broader social protection and economic measures to ensure students have the material conditions necessary for learning and retention. Expand or implement interventions with proven positive impacts—such as conditional cash transfers, scholarships, investments in transport and infrastructure, school meal programs, and connectivity subsidies—ensuring they reach the most vulnerable groups and address their specific needs.
- Promote targeted public–private partnerships (PPPs)
In contexts of fiscal constraint, mobilizing additional resources for specific educational projects is a challenge. Well-designed PPPs can leverage private sector investment to expand infrastructure and equipment without overburdening public budgets in the short term.
Proposal: Promote PPPs for clearly defined purposes, ensuring strong contractual terms, sound planning, effective evaluation mechanisms, and community participation. Prioritize transparency, equity, and the strengthening of public education in all agreements.
Moving forward
Strengthening the financial sustainability of education is not only a technical necessity but also a political commitment to the future of Latin America and the Caribbean. The proposals outlined provide a roadmap for building education systems that guarantee real learning opportunities for all, ensuring that investment is not only increased, but also more equitable, efficient, and financially sustainable.
The Author:
Mariana Huepe is Economist and Social Affairs Officer at ECLAC, with a PhD in Development from University College London. Her work focuses on education, labour inclusion, and gender inequality, with prior experience at UNDP and other international institutions.
1 Data available from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). The latest data available from 2021 was used.
2 Simple average of public expenditure per student at each education level (pre-primary, primary, secondary, and tertiary), calculated as the average of per-level spending across countries with data available since 2021, based on the UNESCO UIS database.