Even before COVID-19 forced a massive closure of schools around the globe, the world was in the middle of a learning crisis that threatened efforts to build human capital—the skills and know-how needed for the jobs of the future. More than half (53 percent) of 10-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries either had failed to learn to read with comprehension or were out of school entirely. This is what we at the World Bank call learning poverty.
Recent improvements in Learning Poverty have been extremely slow. If trends of the last 15 years were to be extrapolated, it will take 50 years to halve learning poverty. Last year we proposed a target to cut Learning Poverty by at least half by 2030. This would require doubling or trebling the recent rate of improvement in learning, something difficult but achievable. But now COVID-19 is likely to deepen learning gaps and make this dramatically more difficult.
The Scale of School Closures
Temporary school closures in more than 180 countries have, at the peak of the pandemic, kept nearly 1.6 billion students out of school; for about half of those students, school closures are exceeding 7 months. Although most countries have made heroic efforts to put remote and remedial learning strategies in place, learning losses are likely to happen.
A recent survey of education officials on government responses to COVID-19 by UNICEF, UNESCO, and the World Bank shows that while countries and regions have responded in various ways, only half of the initiatives are monitoring usage of remote learning. Moreover, where usage is being monitored, the remote learning is being used by less than half of the student population, and most of those cases are online platforms in high- and middle-income countries.
The Economic Cost
COVID-19-related school closures are forcing countries even further off track from achieving their learning goals. Students currently in school stand to lose $10 trillion in labor earnings over their working lives. That is almost one-tenth of current global GDP, or half the United States’ annual economic output, or twice the global annual public expenditure on primary and secondary education.
Simulation Scenarios
In a recent paper (link) I examine three simulation scenarios to gauge potential impacts of the crisis on learning poverty. In the most pessimistic scenario, COVID-related school closures could increase the learning poverty rate in the low- and middle-income countries by 10 percentage points, from 53% to 63%.
This 10-percentage-point increase in learning poverty implies that an additional 72 million primary-school-age children could fall into learning poverty, out of a population of 720 million children of primary-school age.
The Path Forward
The results from these simulations are not destiny. Parents, teachers, students, governments, and development partners can work together to deploy effective mitigation and remediation strategies to protect the COVID-19 generation’s future.
School reopening, when safe, is critical, but it is not enough. The simulation results show major differences in the potential impacts of the crisis on the learning poor across regions.
The big challenge will be to rapidly identify and respond to each individual student’s learning needs flexibly and to build back educational systems more resilient to shocks, using technology effectively to enable learning both at school and at home.
For more details on the simulation methodology, see Azevedo et al (2020)