How is COVID-19 affecting Peruvian families, teachers, and students? How has the education system adapted to remote learning? How can policymakers assess the effectiveness of educational technologies on children's development?

These and other questions have been at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds while forming policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Peru, which has experienced case spikes in recent weeks. The effects of the pandemic have the potential to be very detrimental for educational outcomes. In particular, school closures resulting from lockdowns threaten to result in learning loss for students, particularly for young children in vulnerable contexts.

IPA has partnered with the Ministry of Education in Peru (MINEDU) to provide the ministry with rapid data and evidence to assess a variety of education solutions, including distance learning, to identify the most effective ways to support children’s learning and development in the current context.

This webinar will highlight four aspects of the Ministry’s approach to use data to guide its decision-making during the pandemic and subsequent recovery. Annie Chumpitaz (Peru Ministry of Education) will discuss how the Ministry is using data to monitor parents’ and teachers’ remote learning experiences through an interactive online dashboard. Juan Manuel Hernandez-Agramonte (IPA) will highlight how IPA and the Ministry of Education are working on a distance assessment to be administered remotely to preschool children. Ciro Avitabile (World Bank) will present a project using machine learning to anticipate bottlenecks aimed at improving the Ministry’s roll-out strategy of tablets for remote distance learning. Sergio De Marco (IPA) will share details of a project using existing evidence from Liberia and Peru to inform pandemic response, specifically to shape a national information campaign on returns to education to prevent COVID-19-related dropouts. Bethany Park (IPA) will moderate. The presentation will be followed by a discussion and Q&A.

This webinar is part of IPA's RECOVR Webinar Series: Bringing Evidence to COVID-19 Policy Responses in the Global South. Together with our partners, we are using this series to rapidly share what we are learning with the policy and research community to support evidence-informed response efforts. More information about other events in the series is available here.