The COVID-19 pandemic: the right to education of children and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean

The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly generated an unprecedented crisis for the entire world. The most strongly affected region has been Latin America and the Caribbean, which accounts for 18.5% of COVID-19 cases and 30.3% of deaths in the world as of October 2021, while it represents just 8.4% of the total world population. Children and adolescents have not been exempt from the effects, but rather have been particularly hard hit by the reduction in their families’ well-being and income, the forced confinement, the reduction of interpersonal contact, the closure of schools, the loss of their primary or secondary caregivers, the uncertainty and fear and so on. In this edition of the newsletter, the main article analyses the challenges, reversals, and consequences, as well as the opportunities, for secondary education in Latin America and the Caribbean during and after the pandemic. The mental health of those who make up this age group is the focus of Viewpoints. The remaining sections provide resources on positive experiences, documents and research carried out in the past 18 months.