The President of the World Bank, David Malpass, announced that if a second wave of COVID-19 causes lockdowns in developing countries, about one billion children will be out of school.
Malpass stressed that, because of the pandemic, education systems in developed countries were changed as classes moved to being delivered virtually whereas in underdeveloped states, this just does not happen. Thus, the World Bank estimates that in poor countries about 1 billion children are waiting to go back to the schools which were closed due to the pandemic.
WB is not the first international organization that has warned that the COVID-19 outbreak could seriously affect education. The United Nations also estimated that about 24 million students around the world may leave school altogether as a result of the pandemic.
Henrietta Fore, Executive Director of the U.N.’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that “The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return,” adding that the UN is pushing governments to reopen schools as soon as possible after lockdowns are abolished.
However, many experts within the education sector estimate that because of the pandemic some children will never go back to school at all as increasing poverty levels may force them to work instead of learning.
Malpass also warned that, apart from the effect on education systems, COVID-19 will plunge 150 million people into extreme poverty. According to the Global Partnership for Education, a fund dedicated to education in developing countries, the group most affected by the pandemic in terms of access to education is adolescent girls from the poorest and rural families who are the family members more often cut off from education services rather than in case of boys. Girls frequently have to abandon school due to family pressure for early marriage.
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Save the Children estimates in its report issued in June 2020 that the financial crisis triggered by the pandemic will leave a US$77 billion shortfall in education budgets in the poorest countries within the next 14 months. However, the worst-case scenario assumes this might even be as high as US$192 billion by the end of 2021. Save the Children warns that, in this scenario, 1.6 billion children will be out of school, i.e. more than the number estimated by the World Bank. The charity claims that about 10 million of these children will never return to school.
The organization also listed 12 countries where the risk that children will never return to school after the outbreak is extremely high, estimating this problem may be more relevant in West and Central Africa as well as in Yemen and Afghanistan.
In another 28 countries, there is a high or moderate risk that children will never get back to learning after the pandemic. According to the organization, by the end of this year alone, about 9.7 million children will be out of school.
