Students in South Asia lose future earnings due to COVID-19 school closures: WB

Kathmandu, Feb. 17

A new report by the World Bank has found that in South Asia, today’s students could lose up to 14.4 per cent of their future earnings due to COVID-19-induced education shocks.

The cognitive deficit in today’s toddlers could translate into a 25 per cent decline in earnings when these children are adults, the report, 'Collapse and Recovery: How COVID Eroded Human Capital and What to Do About It' informed.

In South Asia, between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2022, schools were fully or partially closed for 83 per cent of the time—significantly longer than the global average of schools being closed for 52 per cent of that same period. Among the school aged children, on average, for every 30 days of school closures, students lost about 32 days of learning.

"This is because school closures and ineffective remote learning measures caused students to miss out on learning and to also forget what they had already learned. As a result, learning poverty – already 60 per cent before the pandemic — has increased further, with an estimated 78 per cent of 10-year-olds in South Asia unable to read and understand a simple written text," read the report.

According to the report, the COVID-19 pandemic derailed development and caused a massive collapse in human capital for millions of children and young people across South Asia. The report included people who were under the age of 25 at the onset of the pandemic.

"Human capital—the knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate over their lives—is key to unlocking a child’s potential and enabling the countries to achieve a resilient recovery and strong future growth," the WB said in a statement on Thursday while maintaining that yet, the pandemic shuttered schools and places of employment and disrupted key services that protect and promote human capital, such as healthcare and job training.

The report presents the first comprehensive analysis of global data on the pandemic’s impacts on young people at key developmental stages: early childhood (0-5 years), school age (6-14 years), and youth (15-24 years).

“The pandemic shut down schools, decimated jobs, and plunged vulnerable families into crisis, pushing millions of South Asia’s children and young people off-track and depriving them of opportunities to flourish,” said Martin Raiser, World Bank Vice President for South Asia.

Across the region, significant declines were observed in cognitive and social-emotional development. In Bangladesh, for example, toddlers tested in 2022 lagged far behind toddlers assessed in 2019.

Likewise, the report said that in some countries in South Asia that were covered in the report, school enrollment has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Across South Asia, the number of people neither employed nor enrolled in education or training has increased substantially. Moreover, in several countries that were analysed, there was little sign of recovery after 18 months.

According to the WB, in the short term, for young children, countries should support targeted campaigns for vaccinations and nutritional supplementation; increase access to pre-primary education, including social-emotional skills; and expand coverage of cash transfers for vulnerable families. For school-aged children, governments need to keep schools open and increase instructional time; assess learning and match instruction to students’ learning level; and streamline the curriculum to focus on foundational learning. For youth, support for adapted training, entrepreneurship programs, and new workforce-oriented initiatives are crucial.

In the longer term, countries need to build agile, resilient, and adaptive health, education and social protection systems that can better prepare for and respond to current and future shocks.

Published in The Rising Nepal daily on 18 February 2023.