By: Staff Writer
May 20, 2022
The World Bank estimates that the average Caribbean student will lose up to 12 percent of their projected lifetime earnings due to the COVID-19 pandemic’s closure of schools.
Lilia Burunciuc, Caribbean Countries Director at the World Bank, speaking at the “Learning Losses and Impacts of COVID-19 in Caribbean Education,” webinar hosted by the bank, said: “The COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly hard for the for the Caribbean, everybody has felt it and is feeling it today.
“It triggered an increase in poverty and inequality and it challenged the decision makers and public financiers to take urgent measures to strengthen health and education systems to respond to the crisis.
“The magnitude of this crisis cannot be overstated. Schools in the Caribbean were closed for an average of one and a half to two years, which was actually among the world’s longest and we estimate that 170m students in Latin America and the Caribbean were deprived of in person education for at least two out of three effective school days, and if urgent remedial actions are not taken, the projected annual earnings of the average Caribbean student in school today could decline by approximately 12 percent over her or his lifetime.
Tim Johnston, Human Development Program Leader at the World Bank also noted that there was a crisis in education prior to the pandemic and based on the bank’s analysis there were other critical details to take note.
He added: “one of the key indicators in the human capital index is what’s called learning adjusted school years, where the number of years a child spends in school is adjusted by one they actually learn in school by the time they reach 18.
“What we know is that for the countries where you have data, even though on average Caribbean children complete 12.4 years of school, by the time they’re 18, if you adjust for learning, it’s all was only equal to 17.8 years prior to the pandemic.”
He also said that the impact of school closures as a result of the pandemic made the situation worse in Caribbean schools as students were pushed further back. Also, for the first year of the pandemic, one out of four school children were not engaged in a learning programme at all.