5 days ago
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A team of researchers from Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Belize is conducting a regional study to assess Indigenous communities ACCESS to higher education in their respective countries. The project, now in its second year, aims to identify barriers and opportunities affecting Indigenous participation in tertiary education. Today, the Belize research team presented its preliminary findings. Ljay Wade has more.
Ljay Wade: “Are Indigenous groups accessing higher education? That is the question that research groups from Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Belize are currently trying to answer as a part of an ongoing regional research paper. The research has been ongoing for a little bit over a year and today the two leads from Belize’s team held a presentation at the University of Belize where they presented their preliminary findings. Filiberto Penaros, the team lead for Belize, spoke more about the importance of the research.
Filiberto Penaros, team lead: “So we want to understand, so how are they participating? Are they participating? Who and from where? And are they graduating? How long are they taking? So it’s kind of understanding that. And then what are the factors that contribute to their participation? If they do come, what is their experience like drop out, what are the reasons for dropping out, so trying to understand the nature of that participation. So part of it was kind of reviewing a little bit of literature, finding out what is known about the subject, and then uh collecting data. So we collected data, and we’re still collecting data, one, institutional data. So institutional data refers to data that higher education institutions, sixth form universities collect about ethnicity in terms of their enrollments, in terms of their graduation, so they have that statistics, we collecting that data from them. We weren’t able to get from all of them, but we did get from the University of Belize, which is the largest university and most representative. And then uh we conducted a survey as well of students to try to understand the factors that affect their participation. And we’re in the process now of conducting focus group interviews. So this is more qualitative data where they can tell us their stories and they can elaborate more.
Ljay Wade: According to the preliminary findings, Garifuna Males led the pack when it came to seeking out higher education. But after 2016, there was a sharp decline, followed by another decline in 2020 due to COVID-19. Linmawa Rossarolino, the Assistant researcher, says that there also seems to be barriers that hinder Mayan groups especially the Kekchi Maya from accessing higher education.
Linmawa Rossarolino, Assistant Researcher: “The Garifuna group has led higher education for a long time, particularly very strong from 2000 to 2010, after which there was a strong drop. There was another deep drop around 2020, and we see that this particularly affected male Garifuna students. So those are important things to note for intervention purposes. On the other hand, for the Maya groups, the Kekchi students. Well, the Kekchi group hasn’t quite had the access to higher education or has had some barriers. We don’t know exactly what the challenges are there that have been preventing their numbers. But their numbers are very low and even when uh the numbers have increased slightly, for example in 2016 we see an interesting increase in Kekchi female participation, these numbers are still not significant enough to impact that group overall when we’re looking at the total group in the country, especially those that are eligible to come to university versus the ones that we do already have in sixth form and university so these differences highlight the importance of disaggregating and separating that data so that we have individual data for each group. So those are just some of the main findings so far.”
Ljay Wade: “The full findings of this research are expected to be completed by the middle of next year. Reporting for Love News, LJ Wade.”
English (US) ·