## The Education Pandemic

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### School closures and digital divide
- My children last entered their school gates on March 10, 2020.
- A survey of 1,400 schoolchildren from disadvantaged homes across 15 states (Bakhla and others 2021) found:
  - 8 percent of children in rural areas had access to regular online education.
  - 24 percent of children in urban areas had access to regular online education.
- School closures affected 1.6 billion children across the globe.
- In parts of South Asia, Latin America, and Africa, schools have been fully closed for over 80 weeks.
- Uganda reopened schools in January 2022 after 82 weeks of partial or full closure.
- ADB estimates that only 41 percent of lower- and middle-income households in Asia have internet access.
- In West and Central Africa, only 26 percent of households in rural areas owned a television (World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF 2021).
- In India:
  - ASER (2021) shows 68 percent of households with primary-school-age children in rural India owned smartphones.
  - Of those smartphone-owning households, only a quarter of students had access to these phones and therefore had no schooling for nearly two years.
- Remote learning formats in many countries have been limited mostly to mobile phones or broadcast media, constraining reach and continuity of instruction.

### Learning losses and economic costs
- ASER findings (selected rural areas, India):
  - In Chhattisgarh (reopened August 2021), the ability of Standards 3 and 5 students to read a basic Standard 2 textbook declined by over 15 percentage points.
  - In rural Karnataka, the share of Standard 3 students at grade level fell from 19.2 percent in 2018 to 9.8 percent in 2020.
  - Basic arithmetic competency: 17.3 percent could do simple subtraction in 2020, compared with 26.3 percent in 2018.
- ADB (April 2021) estimates:
  - Students in South Asia lost about 0.55 learning-adjusted years of schooling.
  - Students in the Asia-Pacific region, where schools mostly stayed open, lost just 0.08 learning-adjusted years.
- Historical analogue:
  - Andrabi, Daniels, and Das (2020) studied 14 weeks of lost schooling after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and estimate resulting lifetime earnings losses of 15 percent for affected children.
- Projected regional economic impact:
  - ADB estimates losses to future productivity and lifetime earnings for affected students could be $1.25 trillion for developing Asia, equivalent to 5.4 percent of the region’s 2020 GDP.

### Learning investment needs and policy implications
- Reopening schools offers an opportunity to bridge two years of learning losses, but recovery will require:
  - Significant financial resources for physical classrooms, teaching materials, and teachers.
  - A shift in pedagogy from syllabus completion to foundational literacy and numeracy.
  - Measuring learning losses and providing remedial teaching before students progress to the next grade.
- Fiscal context and risks:
  - Countries are starting to scale down pandemic-induced expenditure stimulus and reimpose fiscal discipline.
  - India announced its annual budget for 2022–23 on February 1 and intends to cut public expenditure by 2.5 percent of GDP from 2020–21 in the new fiscal year.
  - Education budgets, slashed at the peak of the pandemic, have not been increased despite the long-term economic costs of school closures.
- Policy recommendation summary (implicit in the analysis):
  - Prioritize urgent investment in education to prevent long-term productivity and earnings losses.
  - Reorient curricula and classroom practice to remedial, foundational learning.
  - Invest in diagnostics, targeted remedial programs, and the human and material resources needed for recovery.

*Source: "The Education Pandemic" by Yamini Aiyar, Finance & Development, March 2022.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2022/march/aiyar.pdf_