More than a year after the global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the hurried region-wide closure of schools across Latin America and the Caribbean, the World Bank has said in a report released last week that the consequential “enormous losses in learning, human capital, and productivity, may translate into a decline in potential aggregate earnings for the region of US$1.7 trillion, or approximately 10 per cent of total baseline earnings.”
Highlighting the main points of the report, titled “Acting Now to Protect the Human Capital of Our Children,” the Bank says that what it describes as “an unprecedented education crisis” facing the region requires “immediate action to mitigate and reverse learning losses.”