Understanding investment requirements in education is vital in establishing feasible education goals in a country, and forming public policy decisions in line with government resources. This is why specialists from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics visited Puerto Rico to provide advice on the preparation of education financing and expenses in line with UNESCO guidelines, thus allowing the data produced to be compared with other countries.

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) mission, headed by specialists Juan Cruz Perusia and Alejandro Vera, was implemented from 31 March to 4 April, and was centred on joining forces with the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics and other public agencies and private organizations with links to the education sector.

This is not the first time that UNESCO and Puerto Rico have worked together in this field: the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics has been overseeing and coordinating compliance with a number of UNESCO’s annual education surveys since 2010. This task has allowed Puerto Rico to develop a number of education indicators, focusing on areas such as measuring levels of access to education. This information is generated in line with standards that permit international comparability, thus constituting a source of official information that international bodies and United Nations agencies use to monitor international commitments, such as the Millennium Development Goals.

Benefits for all

The process of producing data for international comparison is related not only to agreements to provide such data, but also forms policies that bring internal benefits to the countries and territories that implement it. This task permits the improvement of national education statistics production systems, based on the implementation of the international standards that exist in the field, and through technical teams’ participation in pertinent regional technical forums and debates.   

Speaking about this work, UIS regional advisor Juan Cruz Perusia, explained that “this new phase in the technical cooperation process that started in 2010 with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico sets out to systematise education financing statistics in line with the UNESCO methodology for the first time, thus creating reliable, representative, and internationally comparable data on the resources assigned to education, in the public and private spheres, which can be used by authorities and other specialised information users to help improve the functioning of the education system”.

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The Regional Action Plan on the production and use of education statistics - implemented by the Regional Bureau of Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC/UNESCO Santiago) - has been a cornerstone of this key task for over two decades, and in recent years it has been focusing on analysing the region’s education challenges. This initiative has been strengthened through coordination with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), a specialised agency that works to produce global statistics on education, science, technology, and communication. 

In this field, OREALC/UNESCO Santiago and the UIS also provide support for the production of national education statistics, improving the processes for generating international education statistics and indices that can be compared between states, while also supporting monitoring of international goals, promoting evidence-based policy making by bolstering the use and analysis of information for decision making, improving education information awareness building, and assessing the processes used to produce education information.

More information:

• UNESCO Institute for Statistics
• Puerto Rico Department of State
• Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics