New York, NY, June 13, 2022 —  The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) announce the launch of USAID Research in Education for Transformative Opportunities (RETO) as high incidences of violence have contributed to the humanitarian crisis in Northern Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), together with rising rates of out-migration.

Lack of Evidence in Education for Violence Prevention  

In recent decades, Northern Central America (NCA) has faced high rates of violence, mainly at the community, school, and intra-family levels. Violence serves as one of several drivers of internal and external displacement in the region that dramatically affects children, youth, women, and the LGBTQI+ population. Evidence has demonstrated that socioemotional education in childhood positively affects the development of social competencies, reduces anxiety, drug use, stress, and improves academic performance by up to 11%. However, key education stakeholders in NCA often do not receive clear and accessible information on existing evidence or on how to develop educational programs and policies to effectively prevent violence.

USAID and IRC’s Response  

To respond to this crisis in NCA, USAID granted the IRC $8.25 million USD to implement RETO over three years (October 2021- September 2024).  RETO seeks to create demand for sustainable solutions for the prevention of violence that impacts youth through evidence-based educational policies and programs. RETO engages key education stakeholders, including youth leaders, to identify evidence gaps, execute focused search strategies for relevant evidence, and translate the results into actionable guidance for education programming and policymaking. To provide strategic guidance to RETO, IRC leverages its global Evidence to Action team within the Airbel Impact Lab, which specializes in synthesizing research to inform program design.

RETO’s core activities for Year 1 will lay the framework for ongoing work with key education stakeholders, including a Stakeholder and Social Network Analysis (SNA) and country-specific evidence searches, leading to the development of evidence gap maps and country-based evidence reports. RETO is also launching a Youth Research Internship Program to actively engage youth leaders across the region in the evidence mapping process in partnership with partner research institutions, enabling interns to create youth-led tools to support the integration of education evidence into programming or policymaking. Over the next three years, RETO will further contribute to the strengthening of the three education systems in NCA through the dissemination of evidence, tailored technical assistance on evidence-based decision-making, facilitation of youth advocacy initiatives, increased private sector investment in violence prevention, increased capacity of national organizations to use of evidence, and ultimately through the development or modification of laws, policies, or regulations to promote long-term evidence uptake.

To drive RETO’s work in each country, IRC has formed a core team of 11 national organizations, including youth advocates, researchers, policy advocates, educators, and representatives of the private sector: