Advances and Challenges of EdTech in Latin America and the Caribbean

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The educational technology ecosystems’ accelerating growth bounds with opportunities to innovate. What is the key to leveraging these opportunities?

Advances and Challenges of EdTech in Latin America and the Caribbean
Photo: iStock/Blue Planet Studio
Reading time 6 minutes
Reading Time: 6 minutes

The educational technology ecosystems’ accelerating growth bounds with opportunities to innovate. What is the key to leveraging these opportunities

Last year, educational technology boomed in the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) region, with more than 1,500 EdTech startups bringing talent and funding into innovative education ecosystems. Its potential suggests better access to education, enriched learning experiences, and improved student outcomes. However, although it promises positive transformations, it also must face significant challenges in educational systems, like the chronic skills gap and the socioeconomic disparities now in crisis mode.

For this reason, the impact intelligence platform HolonIQ released a joint report in December 2021 with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) during the presentation of the 2022 Global Education Market – Open Briefing. The report entitled “Education Technology in Latin America and the Caribbean” combines the strengths of both organizations to identify EdTech innovations and their impact and the challenges and opportunities involved.

The study states that educational technology “accelerates economic recovery, addresses inequalities, increases access, and multiplies the support and impact of parents, mentors, teachers, and institutions in LAC.” The industry has expanded dramatically in the last 12 months; more than 4,500 jobs have been created in the region. Over the past ten years, $1 billion in venture capital has been invested in 500 funding rounds.

Latin America and the Caribbean are home to more than 180 million students in formal education sectors in 33 countries. LAC comprises 300 million workers and professionals seeking to retrain and improve their skills (reskill and upskill). More than 500 million people in the region demand innovation in reading, writing, arithmetic, and acquiring skills and knowledge necessary to meet the demands of the twenty-first century.

To obtain a context for LAC educational technology, the team consulted public research reports and data from governmental and non-governmental institutions. The report’s methodology included more than 50 interviews with experts, i.e., EdTech executives, investors, educational leaders, technology companies, media, and government entities. In addition, they conducted surveys of 130 stakeholders in 12 countries, including Brazil (46%), Mexico (17%), Colombia (15%), Chile (7%), Argentina (6%), and 9% from other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Data collected from the HolonIQ analysis of more than 2,700 LAC educational organizations and startups identified vital market developments and private equity investment transactions in EdTech over the past ten years.

Key contributions

Both HolonIQ and the IDB believe that education has the power to change the future, and they drew six fundamental conclusions from their findings:

  1. The pandemic worsened the learning crisis in the region and its access gap, affecting the education system in LAC, consequently providing a unique opportunity for EdTech to support innovations and undertakings with educational technology.

  2. Governments, schools, universities, and companies believe that EdTech can improve teachers’ and institutions’ access to education, learning methodologies, and support through tools that facilitate quality time with students.

  3. As the EdTech ecosystems accelerate, LAC students of different ages look to hone their competencies for a highly competitive job market. The demand for educational technology causes institutions to seek alliances to support their digital transformations.

  4. Venture capital investment in LAC more than tripled between 2020 and 2021, as companies have levels of investment never before seen in the region.

  5. The main challenge for the growth of EdTech in Latin America and the Caribbean corresponds to the low levels of digital maturity of institutions coupled with their resistance to change. The education technology industry expects support from the government by creating and supporting initiatives to incorporate EdTech in schools, universities, and workplaces.

  6. LAC leaders see collaboration as crucial to accelerating digital transformation. If stakeholders work together, focusing on students, they can develop teachers’ digital skills and use data to make decisions that attract investment and partnerships in the private sector.

Likewise, surveys of public and private education leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors led to the creation of five steps to improve and accelerate educational technology in Latin America and the Caribbean to achieve a positive impact.

  1. Learning experiences and educational programs must be designed with a learner-centered approach that accommodates various student needs to attain engagement and produce desired outcomes.

  2. Collaboration among government, teachers, parents, companies, educational institutions, and technology companies is necessary to generate changes with the participation of all the actors; all are interconnected through social, cultural, and economic structures.

  3. Educational leaders require informed data to make decisions about learning initiatives. Thus, harmonization, communication, and alignment of economic and labor sectors with student measures and classroom practices will produce accurate findings from data analyses.

  4. If governments establish and promote strategic alliances and stable investment environments, they will attract better talent and outcomes than their peers to drive social and economic development.

  5. The LAC needs to have the infrastructure and personnel capacity to design and transmit digital education, develop twenty-first-century skills in their students, and stimulate their global competitiveness.

Opportunities to create impact

The surveys also revealed that LAC stakeholders define specific opportunities for educational technology to make more impact in various areas of education in their respective countries. About 24% of the sample selected “access to education” as the best opportunity, referring to developing solutions to increase the participation of people in education, especially women who work or live far from educational facilities.


Source: IDB and HolonIQ LAC EdTech Survey. n = 130. respondents. Single answer option.

Nearly a quarter of stakeholders (23%) determined that learning sciences having good teaching strategies, learning environments, proper curricular structure, and assessment can produce better outcomes with solutions generated through EdTech.

Moreover, 20% of respondents pointed out that administration and management can represent an opportunity to impact educational technology by offering support to teachers and improving communication between the academic body and parents.

According to 17%, the student experience with EdTech can benefit from personalized content, digital engagement, and a curriculum designed to help students outside the classroom. Meanwhile, 7% and 9% rated capacity building and upskilling, respectively, as having the lowest impact because stakeholders look to better opportunities to improve systematic problems.

Challenges for EdTech Adoption

Just as there are opportunities to incorporate educational technology into the sector, there are several challenges. The report mentions that the three main challenges for EdTech in the region are resistance to change in the current education system, access to capital, and slow monetization. Other challenges mentioned by the sample participants were access to customers, slow and difficult purchasing processes, finding talent and customers, burdensome regulations, high competition, international expansion, and finding mentors.

These barriers retard the growth of educational technology. The pandemic also significantly interrupted education and learning in LAC, so it is suggested to reconsider traditional strategies to address education, including how EdTech is incorporated.

What is needed?

Two-thirds of the HolonIQ and IDB study participants responded that accelerating the impact of EdTech requires initiatives to incentivize its use in schools and universities and more access to growth capital. For educational technology, working with large public systems requires regulation and stakeholders. However, teachers and institutions working together to achieve common objectives is also a must. A participant from Chile mentioned some challenges: “…finding validation spaces, including through public or private policies. There needs to be more space to demonstrate the validation of the new technologies.”

Some also said the mismatch between the speed of market changes and government regulations could overshadow innovation efforts in education. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said access to more capital is required to support the acceleration of EdTech better. Slow monetization processes in the industry cause this problem. Other issues identified as necessary to generate impact were more substantial support in the initial stage, better connectivity among the EdTechs of the regional ecosystem, and more access to internal and global talent.

Carina Spero, CEO of Competir, the leading Argentine company in digital solutions and edutainment content, said that “we are all working towards the same result: better education, lower dropout rates. We need to continue to develop a sense of EdTech community, from vendors to subscribers to users. A great community that has the same purpose: to improve education.”

The presence of EdTech in Latin America and the Caribbean continues to increase. Its incorporation into the education sector is imminent and full of opportunities. However, there are still several challenges to be faced. Therefore, this report spotlights recommendations that can provide information to policymakers, educational leaders, EdTech entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders to generate initiatives and make the necessary decisions.

Translation by Daniel Wetta

Nohemí Vilchis

EdTech Specialist in Observatory for the Institute for the Future of Education (nohemi.vilchis@tec.mx)

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0