Education in Panama

In this day and age it’s imperative to invest heavily in education if a country wants to become competitive.  The world has evolved into a new age identified as the Information Age, where information is the critical factor to guarantee economic growth.  Failing to look the other way is to fall into a deep hole of poverty and stagnation.  A dramatic example is Africa.

The current President of Panama, Ricardo Martinelli, has a strong commitment to make deep changes in the education of the country.  These are his immediate actions for the next school term that starts in March 2010:

• A free knapsack (mochila) for every public student to carry his or her books and school supplies.
• Free school textbooks needed during the year.
• Free school supplies to be used during the school term (scissors, rulers,  paste, pencils, crayons, brushes and so forth).
• An education subsidy of $20.00 per-month-per-student to help pay the costs of school uniforms.
• A nationwide network of  WiFi hot spots to guarantee free Internet access to wireless electronic artifacts.

All of the above will be provided by the Ministry of Education to approximately 800,000 students enrolled for the next school term.  The cost of this program is about $150 million.  This has never been done before in the history of our country.

I would like to highlight that education in Panama is compulsory for the first six years of primary education and the following three years of high school.

As of the 2004/2005 school year, there were about 430,000 students enrolled in grades one through six—95 per cent attendance. The total enrollment in the six secondary grades for the same period was 253,900 students—60 percent  attendance. More than 90 percent of Panamanians are literate.  The goal is 100 percent literacy.

As of 2004, more than 92,500 Panamanian students attended the University of Panama, the Technological University, and the Santa María La Antigua University.  Including smaller colleges, there are 88 institutions of higher education in the country and the number is growing.  I understand that private research university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  is planning to open a branch in Panama in the near future.

I’m proud to say that enrollments at upper levels of schooling had increased strikingly both in relative and absolute terms since 1960. Between 1960 and the mid-1980s, secondary-school enrollments expanded some four-and-a-half times and higher education, nearly twelve-fold.

In 1965 fewer than one-third of children of secondary school age were in school, and only 7 percent of people aged 20 to 24 years. In the mid-1980s, almost two-thirds of secondary-school-aged children were enrolled, and about 20 percent of individuals aged 20 to 24 years were in institutions of higher education.  The is the correct path to transform Panama into a First World nation.

Below are several pictures of Santa María La Antigua University (USMA), to give you a general idea of what a university campus looks like in this neck of the woods.  Here we go.

A sign of USMA University located at Via Ricardo J. Alfaro in Panama City, Panama. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Photograph of the main building of USMA University in Panama City, Panama. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

A Panamanian flag waves inside the premises of USMA University in Panama City, Panama. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Photograph of a modern sculpture donated by the Spanish Embassy to USMA University on October 12, 1978. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.(

Japan, Ireland, South Korea and Germany has demonstrated how important education is.  For example, Japan is a group of islands with no important deposits of natural resources, only people with sophisticated technological knowledge.  This explains why this small country  is the second economic power in the world.  Knowledge is power!  Good Day.

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