According to the OCDE ranking for education, Peru stands towards the end of the list. In fact, Peru came in the last place in the 2013 survey of education indicators in 65 countries carried out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Because those figures are averages over the whole country, it’s easy to understand that education in the jungle is on the lower end of the scale.
According to the same study, Peruvian students scored below regional countries such as Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, but also countries below Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Tunisia, according to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA.
According to the UNICEF publication on the subject in October 2014, the exclusion of Amazonian communities is reflected in the situation of children and adolescents. For example, chronic malnutrition affects 4 out of every 100 children under five years of age in Lima (Peru’s capital) compared to 29 out of every 100 in the rural regions of the Amazon.
The same publication from UNICEF reports that the inequities between children living on the coast, in the highlands and jungle are surprising, but are even greater when the comparison is made between the urban coast and the rural jungle. Sixty-eight per cent of indigenous children and adolescents in the Peruvian Amazon live in poverty. Three of the five Amazonian regions have the highest rates of multidimensional child poverty: Loreto (80%), Ucayali (77%) and Amazonas (76%).
