On 4th August 2020, António Guterres Secretary-General of United Nations(UN) launched the report titled “Policy Brief: Education during COVID-19 and beyond” states that around 23.8 million additional children and youths may drop out or not have access to school in 2021 due to the economic impacts of COVID-19.
- The Policy brief was built on United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation(UNESCO)’s data and features recommendations on ways to avoid the emerging disaster.
- UNESCO led the drafting of the Policy Brief authored by António Guterres, Secretary-General, which contains the input of 15 organisations.
Impacts of COVID-19 on Education:
i.The COVID-19 global pandemic has affected the school education from primary to secondary level, technical and vocational education and training institutions, universities and other institutions.
ii.Around 94% of the universal learners around 1.58 billion children and youth from pre-primary to higher education in more than 200 countries were affected due to COVID-19.
iii.Around 86% of school children are out of school in the 2nd quarter of 2020 where the vulnerable populations from the low income nations are affected the most due to the pandemic compared to just 20% in the highly developed nations.
Impacts on Girl Education:
The closure of schools due to pandemic exposes girls and young women to child marriage, early pregnancy, and gender based violences which reduces their chance to continue their education.
Economic impacts:
i.The simulation on the developing countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) suggest that the loss of learning by one third in Grade 3 could affect 72% of students to fall behind that by Grade 10.
ii.The economic loss might reach 16,000 USD of lost earnings over a student’s lifetime, which is around 10 trillion USD of lost earnings globally.
iii.The COVID-19 is likely to increase the gap between the educational budget and available money of the low and middle income nations to reach the sustainable development goal(SDG) of quality education by up to one third, which was estimated as 148 billion USD in early 2020.
The recommendations of the Policy Brief:
The brief provides recommendations on 4 areas to control the effects of COVID-19 pandemic:
1.Suppress transmission of the virus and plan thoroughly for school reopening
2.Protect education financing and coordinate for impact
3.Strengthen the resilience of education systems for equitable and sustainable development
4.Reimagine education and accelerate positive change in teaching and learning
About United Nations:
Secretary General– António Guterres
Headquarters– New York, United States of America
About UNESCO:
Director General– Audrey Azoulay
Headquarters– Paris, France
Recent Related News:
i.The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Global
Education Monitoring (GEM) Report Team launched its 2020 Report on Inclusion and Education: All Means All, assessing the progress towards the Sustainable Developments Goal 4 on education and other SDG agendas related to education.
ii.UNICEF and Save the Children, UK based non-profit organisation jointly released “Children in monetary poor households and COVID-19: Technical Note” which states that 672 million children will be trapped in to poverty by the end of 2020 due to COVID-19 Impact
