The global community hopes that before too long a vaccine for COVID-19 will be found, produced and universally delivered, and the world will become safer. But unless action is taken now, the long-term legacies of the pandemic will be rising inequality and a devastating impact on children’s learning.
New analysis for this report shows how COVID-19 may affect both the funding and the delivery of education in some of the countries most at risk of falling behind. We know from previous crises that the longer children are out of school, the greater the risk that they do not return to school.
Save the Children’s new analysis examines which countries are most at risk of seeing their progress towards SDG4 stalling or even reversing due to the impact of the pandemic. It suggests that up to 9.7 million children are at risk of dropping out of school due to rising levels of child poverty. They identified 12 countries – Niger, Mali, Chad, Liberia, Afghanistan, Guinea, Mauritania, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire – as being at ‘extreme risk’ of falling behind in their progress towards SDG4.
This comes at a time when we expect education budgets to be under pressure as governments shift spending towards the health and economic response to the pandemic. This analysis estimates that the economic consequences of the pandemic could lead to an education financing gap in low- and middle-income countries of $77 billion over the course of the next two years.