Publication: COVID-19 and Children’s School Resilience: Evidence from Nigeria
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2021-07
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2021-07-29
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Abstract
This paper analyzes the impact of COVID-19 lockdown measures on children's school resilience. Using an individual fixed-effect linear probability model on Nigeria data, it exploits the quasi-randomness of these measures to estimate their effect on school attendance after the lockdown was lifted. The results show that COVID-19 lockdown measures reduced children's probability of attending school after the school system reopened. This negative impact increased with children's age, reaching a peak among those whose education was no longer compulsory. For schoolchildren in that age group, the negative effect of COVID-19 lockdown measures is likely to be permanent, which, if not reversed, will undermine the quality of the economy-wide future labor force. The paper also finds evidence that in the child marriage-prone North-West part of Nigeria that these measures increased gender inequality in education among children aged 12 to 18. This result suggests that COVID-19 lockdown measures may exacerbate harmful traditional practices such as child marriage.
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“Dessy, Sylvain; Gninafon, Horace; Tiberti, Luca; Tiberti, Marco. 2021. COVID-19 and Children’s School Resilience: Evidence from Nigeria. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9736. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36036 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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