Caribbean · Education
One in twenty: the number that lays bare the Caribbean’s education crisis
Fewer than five in a hundred Caribbean students met the basic exam benchmark in 2024. A regional reparations campaign says the roots run back centuries. The data behind the claim is worth reading closely, and so is what it leaves out.
Of nearly 200,000 students who sat the regional CSEC examinations in 2024, only a small fraction cleared the bar that universities and employers treat as a starting point. The World Bank called the wider picture a crisis, and the number at its centre is hard to argue with.
4.9%
Share of Caribbean students who passed five or more CSEC subjects, including Mathematics and English, in 2024 (World Bank, 2025).
Mathematics tells its own story. Just 36 percent of candidates passed, down several points on the year before. The World Bank’s country director for the Caribbean, Lilia Burunciuc, did not soften the assessment, describing a crisis “jeopardising the future of the Caribbean” during a regional briefing in February 2025. Her colleagues pointed to the causes: rigid, outdated teaching methods, weak infrastructure, thin support for teachers, and a stratified system in which well-resourced schools serve wealthier families while others fall behind.
Where the crisis is said to come from
Those are the immediate drivers. A campaign now circulating the figures argues they sit on top of something older. The Repair Campaign, a Caribbean reparatory-justice movement founded in 2022 and funded by Digicel founder Denis O’Brien, presents the education gap as a direct inheritance of colonialism, working alongside the CARICOM Reparations Commission and the University of the West Indies. Its case is that centuries of enslavement and colonial rule left the region with underbuilt school systems and curricula shaped around Europe rather than the societies that had to use them.
That is an argument, not a neutral finding, and readers should weigh it as one. But its sharpest illustration is difficult to wave away.
The Haiti example
After Haiti won its freedom in 1804, France demanded payment in exchange for recognising it, an indemnity first set at 150 million gold francs to compensate former slaveholders for the people and land they had lost. The young republic borrowed to pay, then borrowed again to service those loans. The final instalment was not settled until 1947, roughly 122 years after the original demand.
Historians have linked that drain directly to Haiti’s schools. Money that might have built a national education system went abroad instead, decade after decade. Two centuries on, a large share of Haitian adults still cannot read or write, and in March 2025 France’s own president acknowledged the indemnity as an injustice. It is the clearest case in the hemisphere of a debt imposed at gunpoint shaping what a country could later afford to teach.
Underpaid teachers, and a workforce that leaves
Closer to the present, teacher pay shows the strain. During a 2024 strike, the Guyana Teachers’ Union said around 65 percent of the country’s teachers earned about US$600 a month, even as Guyana posted some of the fastest economic growth in the world on the back of oil. The government disputed the figure, putting the average nearer US$1,120. Either number sits far below the OECD average, where experienced teachers earn on the order of US$56,000 to US$64,000 a year. St Vincent’s teachers, on the same regional comparison, were placed around US$813 a month.
Then there is the exit. For decades the Caribbean has recorded among the highest rates of skilled emigration anywhere: studies have put roughly 70 percent of the region’s tertiary-educated workforce as having left for wealthier OECD countries, with Guyana, Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago near the top of the list. St Vincent and the Grenadines has long ranked among the highest as well. The region pays to educate its brightest, then loses much of the return to economies that did not fund the schooling.
What “repair” is supposed to mean
The campaign’s conclusion is that money for classrooms is only half an answer. Investment has to be paired with economies strong enough to keep the talent those classrooms produce, or the region simply trains people for somewhere else. Whether reparations are the right vehicle for that is a live political debate, and one on which reasonable people in the region disagree. The underlying problem the figures describe is not really in dispute.
The Vincy Angle
St Vincent and the Grenadines is not a bystander in this data. It has sat among the region’s highest tertiary emigration rates for years, which means the country has been quietly exporting the very people its schools and public purse paid to develop. A teacher here earning a fraction of what the same work pays abroad faces the same maths every graduate does.
None of that requires accepting any single campaign’s framing to matter. Whatever one thinks of reparations, the practical question it raises lands squarely at home: what would it take for a young Vincentian to build a life on the skills gained here, rather than take them on the next flight out? That is a question for budgets and policy in Kingstown, not only for history.
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