Translating global evidence into local practice: The Latin American experience

Abstract

Latin America faces urgent challenges in education. In order to succeed, it must tackle insufficient and unequal learning outcomes, low teacher quality, and inadequate public funding, among other problems. Making good use of global evidence is key to reduce these educational gaps in a shorter time span. Moreover, academic research should drive innovations that can make an efficient and effective use of scarce public resources. In this context, 10 Ministries of Education and the Inter-American Development Bank founded SUMMA, the first regional Education Research and Innovation Laboratory for Latin America and the Caribbean. SUMMA aims to synthesize global evidence, contextualizing it to the local context; to generate relevant research, through research networks; and to promote its dissemination and use by governments, schools and teachers. This presentation will present the main achievements and also the main challenges in the quest to transform global evidence into local practices.