The COVID-19 pandemic has delayed children’s learning and reduced the long-term incomes of other young people in low- and middle-income countries, increasing the threat of a “lost generation,” according to the World Bank.
Millions of today’s academics may lose up to 10% of their long-term gains due to pandemic-induced disruptions to their education, while young children may enjoy a 25% drop in income source as adults.
The findings are based on the Bank of Washington’s research on global information on young people under 25 at the start of the pandemic. The new report analyses global information on the effects of the pandemic on young people at key stages of development: early years of education (0-5 years), school age (6-14 years) and young people (15-24 years).
“The pandemic and school closures have threatened to undo decades of progress in building human capital. Policies aimed at addressing the loss of learning, health, and fundamental skills are imperative to jeopardize the progress of generations,” said David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group.
“Countries want to chart a new course for greater investment in human capital to help citizens become more resilient to the overlapping threats of physical crises, conflict, slow expansion and climate change, and also to lay a solid foundation for faster and more inclusive expansion. “
The pandemic has forced governments to take steps to engage the virus, adding schools and end offices, before starting online categories and remote work. The global fitness crisis has also disrupted other essential elements, such as physical care and vocational training for mothers and children.
A new study by global consultancy PwC has suggested governments collect and process more comprehensive data on the care and well-being of children’s and adolescents’ mental health post-pandemic, new technologies and data analytics.
Policymakers want to invest in their citizens’ well-being first to “give them the most productive possibility imaginable in life,” said Hamish Clark, Middle East healthcare industry partner and director of Middle East wellness at PwC.
Preschool children in several countries have lost more than 34% of early language and literacy learning and more than 29% of math learning due to the pandemic, to pre-COVID-19 cohorts, the World Bank said.
In many countries, even after schools reopened, preschool enrollment recovered through the end of 2021 and declined by more than 10 percentage points, according to the report.
Among school-age children, on average, for every 30 days of school closure, schoolchildren lost about 32 days of learning.
In low- and middle-income countries, nearly one billion young people lost at least a full year of face-to-face education due to school closures, and more than 700 million lost a year and a half. As a result, learning poverty – already 57% before the pandemic – is highest in those countries, with around 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand basic written text, according to the report.
The pandemic has also dealt a severe blow to youth employment. Forty million other people who would have been hired in the absence of the pandemic were left unhired by the end of 2021, worsening youth unemployment outcomes, according to the report.
The source of income for young staff decreased by 15% in 2020 and by 12% in 2021.
People in the labor market with low levels of schooling will earn 13% less in their first decade in the labor market.
Data from Brazil, Ethiopia, Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa and Vietnam showed that 25% of all other young people were not in education, employment or education in 2021.
The window to address such setbacks in human capital is small and urgent action is needed, the World Bank said.
Without a quick reaction from policymakers to avoid existing losses and avoid long-term losses, the pandemic threatens to further deepen poverty and inequality, the lender warned.
“People under 25 today, those most affected by human capital erosion, will make up more than 90 percent of the working-age workforce by 2050,” said Norbert Schady, World Bank chief economist for human development and lead author of the report.
“Reversing the effect of the pandemic on them and making a long-term investment deserves to be a very sensible precedent for governments. Otherwise, those cohorts will constitute not just one lost generation, but several lost generations. “
Short-term measures to help young people participate in specific vaccination and nutritional supplementation campaigns; expanding access to pre-primary education; and expanding the money transfer policy for vulnerable families.
For school-age children, governments should keep schools open and increase instructional time; assess learning and adapt training to students’ learning levels; and streamlining the curriculum to focus on fundamental learning, the World Bank said.
For young people, it supports skills training, entrepreneurship systems and new workforce initiatives.
In the longer term, countries want to build “agile, resilient, and adaptable health, education, and social coverage systems that can better prepare for and respond to existing and long-term impacts,” the World Bank said.
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