By: Staff Writer
March 2, 2023
A new World Bank report, “Collapse and Recovery: How COVID-19 Eroded Human Capital and What to Do about It,” details how children in Latin America and the Caribbean have lost 1.7 years of learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The report said: “New analysis shows that, on average, each month of school closures led to a full month of lost learning, with larger losses in lower-income countries.”
Central American children were out of school longer than that of children in Caribbean. The World Bank in a previous report highlighted their “School Closure Index,” which measures the intensity of the school closure in LAC countries, showed that, on average, countries in Central America (including Mexico) were the ones to suffer the longest school closure spells, and countries in the Caribbean the ones to suffer the shortest, with countries in South America being somewhere in between. In fact, 5 of the top 10 countries of the School Closure Index – Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama– are located in Central America, whereas only 2 of the 10 countries with the shortest school closures – Nicaragua and Uruguay – are not located in the Caribbean.
The report also said: “Globally, between March 2020 and March 2022 an average school-age child lost about one year (37 weeks) of in-person schooling due to COVID-19–related school closures. Overall, 1.3bn children in low- and middle-income countries missed at least half a year of school, 960 million missed at least a full year, and 711m missed a year and a half or more. During this time, globally schools were fully or partially closed 52 percent of the time. This share was 84 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean…”
The report also said: “COVID-related school closures have been singular in multiple ways. First, their unprecedented scale and duration put the world in uncharted territory. Second, the pandemic led to both school closures and economic crisis, making household choices complex and hard to predict. Third, the pandemic also imposed steep costs on the mental and physical health of students and their families. Thus historical evidence may not be a reliable guide to the expected COVID-related school dropouts.”
COVID-19 dealt the biggest setback to global poverty-reduction efforts in decades – 70 million more people pushed back into extreme poverty. But it also caused a hidden but massive collapse in the human capital of young people at critical moments in the life cycle. The impact was much greater in poorer countries.
If unaddressed, there is a great risk that these setbacks will have long-lasting ramifications on human capital accumulation, earnings and economic growth. The cost of inaction is high and the time to act is short. Gaps will widen over time if not addressed.
The report also details how massive COVID’s blow to human capital accumulation really was for people under the age of 25—the generation which will make up 90 percent of the prime-age workforce in 2050.