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Good practice Imported

UNICEF & Paraguay's Ministry of Education — Accessible Digital Textbooks and the 2018 Inclusive-Procurement Mandate

Paraguay · Asunción · See the Paraguay profile · See the Asunción profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 20% 67/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Paraguay has been part of UNICEF's Accessible Digital Textbooks initiative since 2016 and, in August 2018, became the first country to require by law that all books purchased by its Ministry of Education be inclusive, turning a technology pilot into binding national policy.

1,600+
Education staff trained across six LAC cohort countries (by 2023)
66
Textbook prototypes developed across the initiative (by 2023)
2,500+
Students reached across the initiative (by 2023)
UNICEF & Paraguay's Ministry of Education — Accessible Digital Textbooks and the 2018 Inclusive-Procurement Mandate

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
UNICEF Paraguay & Ministerio de Educación y Ciencias (MEC)
Period
2016–2025
Keywords
education, disability inclusion, accessibility technology, public procurement policy, AI/NLP

Context

Paraguay has been part of UNICEF's Accessible Digital Textbooks (ADT) initiative since it launched in 2016, using an AI-enabled toolset to convert standard curriculum materials into accessible HTML, EPUB and app formats with text-to-speech, image descriptions and sign-language video for students with disabilities.

Activities

On 6 August 2018, Paraguay's Ministry of Education required that every textbook the ministry purchases nationwide must be inclusive, turning a technology pilot into a binding, market-wide procurement rule. Paraguayan educators also co-developed one of the initiative's open online courses on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and ADT use, later shared with teachers in Colombia and other cohort countries.

Results

Public UNICEF and Zero Project documentation of the wider initiative reports over 1,600 education staff trained across six Latin American and Caribbean countries and 66 textbook prototypes reaching more than 2,500 students by 2023, but no Paraguay-specific learning-outcome study was found.

Conclusions

The evidence for Paraguay speaks primarily to institutional adoption and policy durability — a market-wide legal mandate since 2018 — rather than measured learning gains.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Ministerio de Educación y Ciencias (MEC) procurement officials, Paraguayan educators co-developing UDL/ADT training courses, UNICEF Paraguay programme team

Conditions for success

  • Binding national procurement rule extending beyond demonstration schools
  • Open, reusable teacher-training courses shared across cohort countries
  • Sustained multi-year UNICEF partnership since 2016

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes Philanthropic / foundation funding

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

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