Direct and indirect effects of the covid-19 pandemic and response in South Asia

Educational attainment

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced school closures across the globe. In South Asia, this mitigation strategy has left 420 million children out of school. We assessed the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational attainment of school-aged children in six South Asian countries, and its sequelae on individual earnings and

national Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Loss in educational attainment can occur in multiple ways, such as loss of learning time or loss of already acquired learning due to school closures (29). However, we focus on the loss of educational attainment that will occur due to the increase

in number of students who permanently drop out of school because of prolonged school closures.

We conceptualized the current cohort of children enrolled in primary and secondary schools using population estimates available from UNESCO (30), and net attendance ratios available from the most recent DHS, for each country

(31-36). We used age- and quintile-specific school dropout rates (Table 4), adapted from those observed during the 1997 East Asian financial crisis in Indonesia (37).

© UNICEF/India/UN0379947/Panjwani/2020