Building Educational Resilience: Insights from Latin America and the Caribbean

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean implemented national multimodal strategies for educational continuity, combining online platforms, television, radio, printed materials, and WhatsApp groups to sustain learning during the school closures. Following the pandemic, the Learning Recovery and Enhancement program (Let’s REAP!) emerged as a regional strategy in the Caribbean to promote learning recovery and improvement, coordinating efforts across countries to strengthen teaching and accelerate the learning that students had lost. All these initiatives reflected a notable capacity for resilience in adapting to highly disruptive circumstances.

The pandemic has not been—and will not be—the only major disruption. The region faces other forms of educational disruption caused by natural events such as hurricanes or floods, armed violence, mass migration, and other health crises. There is a need to strengthen the resilience of our education systems to adapt to current crises and prepare for future disruptions. But what does educational resilience actually mean across the region?

A new regional report developed by the Observatory for Educational Resilience in Latin America and the Caribbean (AdaptED), along with an accompanying policy brief, sheds light on how countries currently understand educational resilience. While resilience is referenced in some policy documents, it remains weakly integrated as a guiding policy approach. Furthermore, although vulnerable groups are acknowledged across policies, the institutional solutions proposed to support them in coping with challenging situations are very limited. Finally, countries identify climate change, disasters, and migration as major disruptions to education, yet responses often fall short of adopting a comprehensive, resilience-oriented approach to addressing these disruptions.

AdaptED, which is part of the GPE KIX Observatory on Education System Resilience initiative, is led by the Group for the Analysis of Development (GRADE), in collaboration with SUMMA, the Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Education for Latin America and the Caribbean, and UNICEF Latin America and the Caribbean. The project examines the meanings and practices of education-system resilience and potential future disruptions to education systems in 11 GPE partner countries in the region, including Belize, Dominica, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

The report, based on the desktop review of national education laws, strategic plans, and curriculum frameworks, addresses the following question: How is educational resilience understood in Latin American and Caribbean countries? For the purposes of the project, we conceptualize education system resilience as the ability to absorb, overcome, and adapt to unexpected situations, ensuring that teaching and learning do not come to a halt because of such disruptions. As part of the desktop review, we examined the use of resilience and related terms in the selected documents, the types of disruptions most frequently mentioned in these documents, and the supports available to vulnerable populations across different disruptions and crises. 

1. Resilience is mentioned, but weakly integrated as an approach to policy design 

One of the key findings of the desktop review is that the concept of resilience appears sporadically across selected documents from different countries. Although it is more frequent in strategic education plans, especially in Caribbean countries, it tends to be framed around individual resilience (e.g., resilient students or teachers), rather than resilience as a characteristic of the education system as a whole.

Dominica emerges as an outstanding case for integrating the notion of resilience. Following the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria, the country adopted a National Resilience Development Strategy to favour a more resilient and sensitive approach to education planning (infrastructure, psychosocial support, data systems, and disaster preparedness). Other countries reference resilience in relation to digital transformation (Guyana), school infrastructure (Saint Lucia), or student capacities (Belize), but few articulate a fully systemic vision.

2. “Strengthening” is a key element of resilience across documents

The term resilience is scarcely used in selected documents. However, references to resilience-related concepts are common. The idea of strengthening education systems is frequently discussed. Across countries, strengthening is primarily associated with improving infrastructure, educational management, teacher training, and support for vulnerable populations. On the other hand, core capacities associated with resilience, such as anticipation, prevention, mitigation, and recovery, appear far less frequently and are mentioned only in highly specific, limited contexts. What does this tell us? This pattern suggests that while countries are envisioning long-term system improvements, they have not yet fully integrated a disruption-oriented system approach into the design of educational policies and programs.

3. Climate change, disasters, and migration are identified as key challenges

Three major types of disruptions are shaping national education agendas: disasters (hurricanes), climate change, and migration. Disasters are the most frequently referenced threat and are closely linked to concerns about school infrastructure and student safety. Climate change, in turn, is addressed through adaptation and risk management strategies, although these often lack concrete implementation tools. Migration has also become an increasingly visible challenge, associated with school dropout, violence, language barriers, and the complex processes of reintegrating migrant children into education systems, especially in Central America and the Caribbean.

4. Vulnerable groups are recognized, but institutional solutions are limited

The desktop review shows that countries in the region recognize the complex situations that vulnerable populations face in moments of educational disruptions. We all know this reality: crises have a deeper impact on those who already experience multiple forms of inequality—whether due to social class, socioeconomic status, gender, ethnic origin, migration status, or place of residence—resulting in more fragile educational trajectories and greater barriers for children and adolescents. This means that students living in poverty, children in rural and indigenous communities, migrant students, learners with disabilities, and girls are exposed to greater educational risks. While policy documents acknowledge these groups, they often fail to outline concrete strategies to address the overlapping risks during crises. 

So where do we go from here? Educational resilience, especially at the system level, in Latin America and the Caribbean is still largely under construction. Caribbean countries show greater progress due to their high exposure to disasters; however, across the region, resilience is not yet fully embedded in the design of education systems.

A resilience-based approach offers a powerful lens to understand that vulnerability in education is fundamentally intersectional, as poverty, ethnicity, gender, disability, and migration interact to shape educational trajectories in complex and unequal ways. However, across many national policy documents, resilience continues to be framed primarily in terms of the development of individual skills—of students, teachers, or schools—rather than as a characteristic of the education system as a whole. 

Disruptions caused by natural events, pandemics, migration or violence do not occur in isolation; rather, they overlap and interact, generating highly negative effects for the most vulnerable population groups. Building resilient education systems, therefore, requires considering how systems develop and designing institutional capacities to respond effectively to increasingly uncertain scenarios. 

In summary, the first comparative report developed by AdaptED not only helps to understand how national governments in Latin America and the Caribbean understand educational resilience but also offers an entry point into the challenges involved in integrating a resilience-based approach for designing and implementing educational policies and practices. This approach might enable education systems to address and respond to disruptions, such as disasters, climate change, and migration, that they continue to struggle to manage effectively.