Shakira: Pop star, Humanitarian, Colombiana.

Huffington Post
http://bit.ly/Hptptm

As The Huffington Post reported, Latin American pop superstar Shakira joined over 30 world leaders at the 6th annual Summit of the Americas held over the weekend in Cartagena, Colombia, to advocate for children.

On April 16, 2012, at the 6th Summit of the Americas, Shakira joined President Obama and President Santos of Colombia in order to speak on behalf of President Barack Obama's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. She spoke about the need for education and early childhood development in order to meet the needs of the 35 million children in Latin America. She spoke about the need to eradicate of poverty, and promoted a type of collaborative development in which everyone can be involved.


Here is Shakira's full speech, and here is a highlight:

In the 17 years that I have spent investing and promoting education I can state that without a doubt, investing in education has never let me down because every effort and every dollar invested yields results and they yield results in the short term, because kids grow up fast.

Shakira should be commended for her humanitarian work and certainly serves as a model for the celebrity world in terms of giving back. There is absolutely nothing negative that I can gleam from this type of work in the developing world. Her close relationship to Colombia, being a native born Colombiana, makes her the perfect candidate to speak at the summit. Her voice is quite powerful, with her superstar status, and she is an excellent role model for young girls around the world and in Latin America, as she works to ensure quality education for them. With over 30 world leaders present, Shakira certainly stood her ground. Her activism on behalf of disadvantaged children is the work of a philanthropist that extends far beyond that of most celebrities. Check out this site for more information on Shakira and the wonderful work that she is doing: http://www.shakira.com/philanthropy/


My concern and question pertains to how realistic these goals are, especially if we consider that the 2nd the principal objectives set by the Second Summit of the Americas consist of

1. Ensuring, by the year 2010, universal access to quality primary education for all children and access to quality secondary education for at least 75 percent of young people, with increasing percentages of young people who complete secondary education; and

2. Providing the general population with opportunities for life-long learning.

For more information regarding the Summit of the Americas and Education, click here.


It is hard to know what is being accomplished and where we still have to go in terms of development and education in Latin America. However, we should be careful when making promises because it is now 2012 and these objectives have still yet to be reached.

The Progress of Education in Latin America

Photograph: Manu Dias/AGECOM Bahia

Moving Latin American Education Forward

Latin Business Chronicle

February 15, 2012

By Gabriel Sanchez Zinny
Citation: http://tinyurl.com/7jahvuo

In the last few decades, Latin America has fared poorly in various international educationtesting assessments. The most well-known, the Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the OECD most recently in 2009, only included nine countries in the region, but the results were not encouraging, as these nine participants finished somewhere between 44th and 63rd place, out of 65 countries tested. Chile placed at the top of the region, with Uruguay close behind, but both countries still ranked well below average. However, there are encouraging signs of education reform in Latin America, and they provide a foundation for improving education throughout the region—a daunting but feasible and necessary task.

Article clipped; see link above for full version

Despite the low grades that Latin America has received on international education testing assessments, there has been a surge in funding for education throughout the region. In the past several years, Latin America nations have, individually, spent about $200 billion per year on education and as a region has received more than $5 billion from multi-lateral organizations. Their approach to education has also recently changed. Once focused on school attendance and retainment of students, ministries of education are now concentrating on investing in the quality of schools. Primarily they are beginning to follow the models of their fellow global nations like Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. Studies in these countries have shown that teachers are the essential school based factor that influences achievement rates of students.

As a result of the large amount of funds required to propel these ventures, Latin America have seen a new set of investors join the education scene. Business companies and other organization have stepped up in order to address these educational woes, providing support when public sectors do not have the resources or capital. Organizations like Argentina's EducAr 2050, Mexicanos Primeo, and Brazil's Todos Pela Educacao, are promoting the value of stronger curricula and effective teachers by integrating improved management skills and introducing technology into the classroom. It is the hope of these regional programs and initiatives to not only provide better support to the education system, but to also improve the learning conditions and quality of education for future generations.

When I initially read this article I was skeptical of Latin America's tactics to solve their problems with the quality of education in their respective countries. Immediately their intentions were good, to invest large sums of money in their education system. However their quick reactions only fulfilled their short term goals. When Latin American countries' focus shifted from short term to long term, they refined their approach and found global models that produced the results that they desired. Even then I was wary of their choice to have outside education systems be the model of achievement for their own. The last time I read an article about Latin America modeling other more "developed" nations' education systems, it ended in protesting on the streets in Chile (see my post Hidden Strife within Chile's Education System). However I was pleasantly surprised that, unlike the case of Chile, less government involvement and more private initiative seem to not only support the financial aspects of education reform, but also the personal side of education.

For me this article touched upon many of the same issues and concerns seen in Jaime's post The Case for Local Business Support for Education in Nicaragua. These companies took an interest in promoting education reform not just because it would improve the achievement of students, but that improving the quality of education now could lead to many other long lasting results. The benefits that society could reap from these investments could transcend present time and support the success of future generations. While this article focused more on national organizations rather than local ones, I feel that the concepts are very much similar. This sense of nationalism and pride propelled these organizations to take a calculated risk and invest in the future of their country's education system in hopes that the results generated would indeed produce an overall benefit to society and not just improve one set of achievement statistics.