COVID Derails Cognitive Development of Younger Population
A new World Bank report, Collapse and Recovery: How COVID-19 Eroded Human Capital and What to Do About It, reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a detrimental impact on the cognitive development and lifetime earnings of children and young people.
It says this is also derailing development for millions of young people in low- and middle-income countries.
The report analysed global data on the pandemic’s impacts on young people at key developmental stages: early childhood (0-5 years), school age (6-14 years), and youth (15-24 years), and found that the pandemic has caused a massive collapse in human capital at critical moments in the life cycle.
Today’s students could lose up to 10% of their future earnings due to COVID-19-induced education shocks, and the cognitive deficit in today’s toddlers could translate into a 25% decline in earnings when these children are adults.
Younger Population Loss of Learning
Due to the pandemic, preschool-age children in multiple countries have lost more than 34% of learning in early language and literacy and more than 29% of learning in math, compared to pre-pandemic cohorts. In many countries, even after schools had reopened, preschool enrolment had not recovered by the end of 2021, and it was down by more than 10 percentage points in multiple countries.
Among school-age children, on average, for every 30 days of school closures, students lost about 32 days of learning. This is because school closures and ineffective remote learning measures caused students to miss out on learning and also forget what they had already learned.
COVID-19 also dealt a heavy blow to youth employment, with forty million people who would have had a job in the absence of the pandemic not having one at the end of 2021. Youth earnings contracted by 15% in 2020 and 12% in 2021.
New entrants with lower education will have 13% less earnings during their first decade in the labor market. Evidence from Brazil, Ethiopia, Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa, and Vietnam showed that 25% of all young people were neither in education, employment nor training in 2021.
Other Impacts on Youth
World Bank report highlights evidence-based policy options to recover from current losses and forestall future ones. In the short term, for young children, countries should support targeted campaigns for vaccinations and nutritional supplementation; increase access to pre-primary education; and expand coverage of cash transfers for vulnerable families.
For school-age children, governments need to keep schools open and increase instructional time; assess learning and match instruction to students’ learning levels; and streamline the curriculum to focus on foundational learning.
For youth, support for adapted training, job intermediation, entrepreneurship programs, and new workforce-oriented initiatives are crucial. In the longer term, countries need to build agile, resilient, and adaptive health, education, and social protection systems that can better prepare for and respond to current and future shocks.
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