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Standing under the canopy of a tree to shelter from the scorching sun in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second city, a woman in her late 50s writes with a black marker pen on a cracked whiteboard. Ten children, uniformed in white, sit on plastic chairs – some attentive, others lost in the urban bustle.
Such unconventional schooling has become the new normal – not just in Maracaibo but in communities across Venezuela – as a lack of basic state support and infrastructure forces teachers to leave their dilapidated classrooms behind and improvise outdoors.
Venezuela once pioneered access to education in Latin America, registering notable achievements under former President Hugo Chávez, who implemented a series of successful reforms – including a mass literacy campaign and meal programmes for students.
Between 1999 and the mid-2000s, enrolment reportedly rose from 85% to 95% in primary education and from 40% to 70% in secondary. In 2005, after Chávez stated that 1.5 million Venezuelans had learned to read and write in just two years, UNESCO, the UN’s educational and cultural agency, awarded him a major international prize.
But years of mismanagement under his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, has led to a severe decline in the quality of education and unprecedented levels of absenteeism. This has come amid an all-encompassing and relentless humanitarian crisis that has marked Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian 12-year rule – pushing nearly eight million Venezuelans to migrate.
By 2023, 40% of Venezuelan students aged three to 17 went to school irregularly. Last year, a staggering 34% of children and young adults between the age of three and 24 – three million people – did not attend any educational institution.
After a period of relative stability, the wobbling economy is at risk from new storms – rising inflation, currency depreciation, and renewed US oil sanctions. Repression has also been ramped up since the July 2024 presidential election, which was decried internationally as fraudulent. All this threatens not only to deepen Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis but to also accelerate the collapse of the education system.
“Education is the main structural problem in the country,” said Fernando Pereira, a teacher and founding member of children’s rights NGO CECODAP. “In addition to the impact it has on the present, and on the quality of life of the population, it compromises the possibilities of future generations and the development of the country.”
For this special report, The New Humanitarian travelled to public schools in three different areas of historical and social relevance in Venezuela: the western oil city of Maracaibo; Ciudad Guayana, in the southeastern state of Bolívar; and Margarita Island, up in the north. We spoke with students, parents, grandparents, teachers, and principals to find out how they’re coping with the dramatic decline of the education system. We heard a long laundry list of concerns, but also found slivers of hope.
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