With a new coronavirus pandemic entering its third year, 23 countries – with a total of nearly 405 million school-age children – have yet to fully reopen their schools, UNICEF said on Wednesday. worrying about the risk of dropping out of school.
In the past two years, nearly 147 million children have missed more than half of their classroom learning hours, a global shortfall of 2 trillion hours, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.
“When children have no direct interactions with their teachers and peers, learning suffers. When they no longer have any interaction with them, the delays can prove irreversible”, alerted Catherine Russell , the executive director of UNICEF, in a press release.
“Given the growing inequalities in access to learning, education risks becoming the greatest factor of division, instead of contributing to equal opportunities. Yet we will be called upon to suffer the consequences of such a failure,” she continued.
In addition to the learning delays noted, UNICEF says in a report that new data shows that a large number of children have not found their way back to school even though it has reopened.
This is, for example, the case for 43% of public pupils in Liberia when it reopened in December 2020. In South Africa, the number of out-of-school children tripled between March 2020 and July 2021, rising from 250,000 to 750,000. In Uganda, one in ten school-aged children was out of school last January.
The report also cites Malawi with an increase in the dropout rate among girls in secondary school, from 6.4% in 2020 to 9.5% in 2021. Finally, a survey of 4,000 young Kenyans aged 10 to 19 showed that 16% of girls and 8% of boys did not return to school after reopening.