Five files,
and what came of them

Belize's secondary sector has long lost students at the transition from primary school. The Ministry of Education's own stated rationale for the project is that only 72 per cent of primary school graduates proceed to secondary education, and that cost is a principal reason. Many of the schools involved are grant-aided rather than wholly government-owned, so families were paying tuition at what were, locally, the only secondary schools available.

To eliminate tuition and fees at participating government secondary schools, and to remove the surrounding costs — meals, uniforms, transport, learning devices — that keep children out of classrooms even when tuition is free.

Fonseca was Minister of Education, Culture, Science and Technology when the project was designed and launched, and has publicly set out its rationale, its expansion schedule and its intended end point.

2022/23 — opened at four government secondary schools on the southside of Belize City, covering 947 students.

2023/24 — five further schools in the southern region joined.

2024/25 — twelve more secondary institutions added nationwide, including schools in Belmopan, Orange Walk, Cayo and Toledo.

By that point roughly seventeen schools were participating, representing close to half the country's secondary school population.

Because the project is applied school by school rather than universally, families at non-participating schools continue to meet costs that their neighbours no longer face — a disparity that has drawn public comment in Belize while the roll-out continues.

The project is on a stated trajectory to cover about 60 per cent of secondary students, and is projected to reach more than fourteen thousand by the 2026/27 fiscal year, en route to free secondary education at every government high school.

It is the largest change to the cost of Belizean secondary schooling in recent memory, and it is structural: it alters what a household pays rather than what a ministry announces.

Under the Education and Training Act, a child of compulsory school age in Belize meant a child of not less than five and not more than fourteen. In practice that allowed a child to leave lawfully at the point of transition into secondary school. Ministry data put the national secondary net enrolment rate at 56.5 per cent in 2022 — meaning a substantial share of children between thirteen and sixteen were not enrolled in secondary school at all.

To redefine compulsory school age as five to sixteen, so that remaining in school through the critical years became a legal requirement rather than a family's discretionary choice.

Fonseca held the education portfolio throughout. Cabinet first introduced the adjustment in 2022; the ministry consulted on it through 2023; the bill was brought forward at the end of that year.

2022 — Cabinet introduces the proposed change.

December 2023 — the Education and Training (Amendment) Bill is published and the ministry consults publicly on raising the age.

2 February 2024 — the National Assembly passes the legislation, amending the definition of a child of compulsory school age to a child not less than five and not more than sixteen years of age.

A compulsory-age law only works if the places, the transport and the affordability exist to honour it. The amendment was therefore inseparable from the Upliftment Project and the school transport and feeding commitments running alongside it.

Belizean children are now legally required to remain in school until sixteen. The measure was not retroactive and did not, by itself, create places — it set the obligation that the rest of the programme was built to meet.

It is the piece of the education programme most likely to outlast any particular administration, because it sits in statute rather than in a budget line.

A large share of Belize's secondary and tertiary institutions are grant-aided: owned by churches or community bodies, publicly funded in part. Government met a portion of staff costs; the balance fell to school management. The teachers' unions had negotiated a remedy — Proposal 22 of the 2018 collective bargaining agreement — which had not been implemented.

For government to assume 100 per cent of salaries, allowances, pensions and service benefits for teaching and non-teaching staff at grant-aided secondary and tertiary institutions.

Fonseca announced the commitment as Minister of Education on 7 December 2023 and set out its scope and cost.

The commitment covered 30 grant-aided secondary schools employing 728 teachers — 50.7 per cent of the country's secondary educators — and 8 grant-aided tertiary institutions employing 151 lecturers, some 53 per cent of tertiary educators. A further 175 non-teaching staff were included: 128 at secondary and 47 at tertiary level. In total, 1,054 employees.

The measure took effect in January 2024 and was not retroactive: it does not reach teachers who had already retired.

An initial increase of about $9.4 million in 2024, with a further $1.7 million for non-teaching staff, rising towards $10 million annually by 2028 — an increase in government expenditure of roughly $13 million a year.

Roughly half the country's secondary and tertiary educators moved onto full public funding for their salaries, pensions and service benefits.

It resolved a structural inheritance in Belizean education finance that had persisted for decades, and it delivered an outstanding item from a collective bargaining agreement rather than announcing a new one.

Education has drawn roughly 23 per cent of Belize's national budget. The question Fonseca has repeatedly posed of that spending is not whether it is large enough but what it produces: “What impact is this investment having on our education system, on the development of our country?”

The Belize Education Sector Plan 2021–2025, subtitled Making Education Work for Belize, was presented by Fonseca to Cabinet, which gave it full endorsement. It was organised around four strategic priorities: reforming the system of education; transforming teaching and learning; prioritising underserved sectors; and maximising human capital.

A new national curriculum framework followed, built on competency-based and project-based learning. “We have launched a new national curriculum framework that focuses on competency-based learning and project-based learning,” Fonseca said in August 2023, adding that teacher training was central to it: “Teachers are the frontline of education so it's very important for us to provide training opportunities.”

Belize Education Sector Plan 2.0 covers 2026 to 2030, launched against a reported education allocation of about $300 million for the fiscal year. Fonseca set out five core objectives, the first being to expand equitable access and completion at every level of education, from primary through university. The plan leans on digital access, competency-based learning, sharper accountability and stronger partnerships.

School feeding — to be scaled up to 35,000 students by 2030.

Transport — 280 bus runs carrying more than 14,000 students and teachers at about $12 million a year, rising to 295 runs at about $12.5 million.

Inclusion — more than 2,000 teachers trained to manage classrooms with children of diverse abilities, and around 20,000 children screened for special educational needs since 2021.

Publishing a costed, dated plan and then a successor to it is what allows a ministry to be held to account. The second plan restates the first's central problem — that access without completion is not enough — and commits to closing it.

Fonseca took Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade on 1 January 2024. Belize's central diplomatic question is Guatemala's territorial, insular and maritime claim, which both states agreed to place before the International Court of Justice. Belize also has a case before the Court involving Honduras, in which Guatemala was permitted to intervene as a non-party.

Fonseca has consistently framed the case as one to be settled peacefully and finally. Speaking to the General Assembly in September 2024 he said Belize was “committed to the final settlement of Guatemala's territorial insular and maritime claim” and welcomed Guatemala's stated commitment to respecting and abiding by the Court's ruling. He has also pressed for a Sarstoon protocol governing conduct on the river that forms part of the boundary, and in September 2025, after Guatemalan armed forces raised a flag on Sarstoon Island, publicly described a Guatemalan statement on the incident as disappointing.

At the 79th General Assembly he set out Belize's position as a member of the Alliance of Small Island States: that the G20 accounts for some 80 per cent of global emissions while AOSIS members contribute less than one per cent. He called for global warming to be limited to well below 1.5 degrees Celsius, for the new climate finance goal then to be decided in Baku to contain minimum allocations for small island states, and for the urgent capitalisation of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.

He commended to all member states the Declaration on Sea Level Rise and Statehood adopted by AOSIS leaders on 23 September 2024, which affirms that the sovereignty or statehood of small island developing states cannot be challenged in any circumstance of climate-related sea level rise.

On 22 July 2025 Fonseca signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with the United States Secretary of Homeland Security establishing a Biometric Data Sharing Partnership, deploying biometric capture at Belize's international airport and land border crossings.

On 22 October 2025 he signed a Safe Third Country agreement with the United States, effective initially for two years and terminable by either party. Under it Belize would accept only Central American and Caribbean nationals, with Guatemala expressly excluded because of its claim on Belizean territory, and Fonseca put the practical scale at roughly ten people a year. The agreement requires Senate ratification and amendments to Belize's Refugee Act before it can operate.

Both agreements were contested at home. The biometric partnership drew criticism on sovereignty and privacy grounds; Fonseca has responded that the Belizean constitution and national legislation provide safeguards, that personal data cannot be passed to third parties, and that it is used solely for security purposes. The Safe Third Country agreement was referred to legislators for debate.

He has represented Belize at the 2nd India–CARICOM Summit in Georgetown in November 2024, at the twenty-eighth meeting of the CARICOM Council for Foreign and Community Relations in May 2025, and at the sixteenth special meeting of the CARICOM Community Council of Ministers in Basseterre in February 2026. He met United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in New York on 28 September 2024.

For a country of Belize's size the foreign ministry is not principally a trade office. With the territorial question before the Court and the coastline exposed to sea level rise, the arguments Fonseca makes abroad bear directly on whether the state's territory and its economy hold.