Publication: Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A Set of Global Estimates
Date
2020-06
ISSN
Published
2020-06
Author(s)
Abstract
School closures due to COVID-19 have
left more than a billion students out of school. This paper
presents the results of simulations considering three, five
and seven months of school closure and different levels of
mitigation effectiveness resulting in optimistic,
intermediate and pessimistic global scenarios. Using data on
157 countries, the analysis finds that the global level of
schooling and learning will fall. COVID-19 could result in a
loss of between 0.3 and 0.9 years of schooling adjusted for
quality, bringing down the effective years of basic
schooling that students achieve during their lifetime from
7.9 years to between 7.0 and 7.6 years. Close to 7 million
students from primary up to secondary education could drop
out due to the income shock of the pandemic alone. Students
from the current cohort could, on average, face a reduction
of $355, $872, or $1,408 in yearly earnings. In present
value terms, this amounts to between $6,472 and $25,680
dollars in lost earnings over a typical student's
lifetime. Exclusion and inequality will likely be
exacerbated if already marginalized and vulnerable groups,
like girls, ethnic minorities, and persons with
disabilities, are more adversely affected by the school
closures. Globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could
generate learning losses that have a present value of $10
trillion. By this measure, the world could stand to lose as
much as 16 percent of the investments that governments make
in the basic education of this cohort of students. The world
could thus face a substantial setback in achieving the goal
of halving the percentage of learning poor and be unable to
meet the goal by 2030 unless drastic remedial action is taken.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Azevedo, Joao Pedro; Hasan, Amer; Goldemberg, Diana; Iqbal, Syedah Aroob; Geven, Koen. 2020. Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A Set of Global Estimates. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9284. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33945 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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