COVID-19 Interrupting Students' Learning Cycles Worldwide

"These are contexts of extreme poverty, economic vulnerability and crisis where gender disparities in education are highest. In Mali, Niger and South Sudan -- three countries with some of the lowest enrolment and completion rates for girls -- closures have forced over four million girls out of school."
"For girls living in refugee camps or who are internally displaced, school closures will be most devastating as they are already at a disadvantage."
"Refugee girls at secondary level are only half as likely to enrol as their male peers."
Stefania Giannini, assistant director general for education, UNESCO
Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, chief executive for Plan International

UNESCO

In late March UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) brought together education ministers representing Costa Rica, Croatia, Egypt, France, Iran, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru and Senegal in a virtual meeting organized for the purpose of discussing measures geared toward ensuring that with schools shut due to the novel coronavirus emergency, how to maintain future education for students whose formal education has been interrupted.

Fully 188 countries of the world by March 4 had shut down their educational facilities, a move that has affected a colossal number of children world-wide. The global pandemic has struck all metrics of advanced society and none more heavily than children's educational futures, leaving 91.3 percent of the globe's children from primary grades through to college and vocational school at academic loose ends. In some advanced countries of the world the slack has been taken up temporarily through online e-classes.


Understandably that option is limited to countries that are wealthy and who have the structure and capacity to undertake such alternatives, along with a population that is computer-savvy and able to afford both the technology and the maintenance costs. An estimated 1,576,021,181 students have been affected across the globe, and according to UNESCO, it is girls whose futures will be most affected.

A mere 0.1 percent of the world's students had been affected by school shut-downs by mid-February, about a million. At that time it was only China that took steps to shutter their schools as it coped with the first emergence and surge of the SARS-CoV-19 virus that causes the novel coronavirus. As the virus made it's swift and steady spread from China to the global community, continent to continent government authorities began to close schools to protect children and control the epidemic's astonishing spread.

More than 1.2 million cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed worldwide, with the understanding that the true figure may be well in excess of that number, given the lack of adequate testing in many affected countries. Of the students out of school, over 111 million represent girls from the world's least developed countries "where getting an education is already a struggle", for them.

UNESCO