School closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic have caused almost “irreversible” losses in education among children around the world, Unicef lamented on Monday.
More than 616 million students remain affected by full or partial school closures, the UN children’s agency said.
In many countries, these disruptions, in addition to having deprived millions of children of the acquisition of basic skills, have affected their mental health, increased their risk of abuse and prevented many of them from having a access to “a regular source of nutrition”, according to UNICEF.
“We are simply faced with an almost insurmountable magnitude of loss to children’s education,” Robert Jenkins, head of education at UNICEF, said in a statement, almost two years after the start of the pandemic.
And reopening schools “is not enough”, he added, calling for “intensive support to recover lost education”.
Unicef reports that “learning losses due to school closures have left up to 70% of 10-year-olds unable to read or understand simple text, compared to 53% before the pandemic” in countries with low and middle income.
|
© AFP/Archives Temperature taking of students returning to school in Addis Ababa on October 26, 2020, after a seven-month closure of all schools in Ethiopia |
–
Thus in Ethiopia, children learned only between “30 and 40% of the mathematics they would have learned if the school year had been normal” in primary school, estimates the UN agency.
Rich countries are far from being spared. In the United States, for example, learning losses have been observed in several states, whether in Texas, California or Maryland, explains UNICEF.
School dropouts are also a problem: in South Africa, “some 400,000 to 500,000 students are said to have dropped out of school altogether between March 2020 and July 2021”.
Finally, in addition to the increased rates of anxiety and depression in children and young people linked to the pandemic, “more than 370 million children around the world have been deprived of school meals during school closures. “, while it is “for some children the only reliable source of food and daily nutrition”.
–
