© UNESCO
Latin America and the Caribbean is a profoundly heterogeneous region with great specificities, made up of 41 countries and territories, in which some 600 languages are spoken. It is formed by very different realities, including those of education and more specifically of adult and youth education. […]
It is also the most unequal region in the world, with 71 million persons living in extreme poverty and a further 200 million in poverty. Educational, political, economic and social exclusion are all faces of the same coin. While education – and within that, adult and youth education – is a fundamental tool for combating poverty and social exclusion, […] without undertaking structural changes and without the convergence of other policies, it is impossible for education alone to offer solutions for these same questions.
After a period of stagnation on the part of Governments and international organizations during the 1990s, adult and youth education has, in recent years, achieved renewed momentum in the region. Significant advances have been made at the legislative and policy level in the majority of countries, with regard to the recognition of the right to education and to linguistic and cultural diversity. In spite of all this, each one of these advances presents, at the same time, new and old challenges. The distance between legislation and policies and what has actually being achieved continues to be great. This implies the need for more participative ways of constructing policies and for greater monitoring by civil society in general and on behalf of the beneficiaries of adult and youth education in particular.
From: From Literacy to Lifelong Learning: Towards the Challenges of the 21st Century, adopted at the CONFINTEA VI Preparatory Conference in Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico City, Mexico, 10 –13 September 2008
