What do we know about the effects of COVID-19 on girls’ return to school?
At its peak in 2020, COVID-19-related school closures affected more than 1 billion learners around the world. Girls’ education advocates feared the worst: Prolonged school closures and lockdowns would harm girls’ health and well-being, not to mention the continuity of their learning. The 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa foreboded a cocktail of threats including sexual and gender-based violence, unintended pregnancies, forced marriage, and early transitions to work. Estimates projected that between 11 million and 20 million girls would not return to school after COVID due to these and other factors.
Have these fears been realized?
We look at the evidence so far—including from within a portfolio of research funded by Echidna Giving’s COVID-19 response fund—to answer this question. While the evidence draws primarily from sub-Saharan Africa, we offer generalizable advice to education systems around the world grappling not only with when they will reopen fully, but also how many more times they may need to shut down and reopen as new waves and new variants of the coronavirus spread. (Note: Dana Schmidt, senior program officer, and Erin Ganju, managing director, are employees of Echidna Giving, which provides financial support for the Center for Universal Education. Brookings is committed to quality, independence, and impact in all of its work. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment.)
Recent evidence from Senegal and Ghana suggests good news when it comes to girls’ reenrollment.
Both countries saw surprisingly low overall dropout rates (1.6 percent and 2 percent, respectively) when schools reopened in November 2020 and January 2021, respectively. In Senegal, there was no statistical difference between the dropout rate for girls and boys, and in Ghana, boys—especially from poor and rural households—were more likely to have dropped out than girls. Similar findings have also been observed in Ethiopia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
Nonetheless, this good news (for girls) is coupled with bad news for everyone in terms of learning loss, as reflected by grade repetition.
In Senegal, grade repetition nearly doubled from pre-COVID levels (rising from 6.3 percent to 11.4 percent). This was especially pronounced for students in exam years, or the last grade level of primary and secondary school. Meanwhile, in Ghana grade repetition nearly tripled from pre-COVID levels (rising from 3.5 percent to 10.5 percent), again with boys more likely to be repeating than girls. And in terms of numeracy scores, learning gains for both girls and boys in Ethiopia have slowed, with the gender gap narrowing slightly.
Although the aggregate statistics suggest that decades of efforts to normalize girls’ education are paying off, when you zoom in on adolescent girls, a more somber story emerges.
For many girls, COVID-19’s associated economic crises exacerbated gender inequalities that are more acute among older adolescents—from increased limitations on their freedom of movement to the need to care for younger siblings and perform household chores to the likelihood of being married off to relieve pressure on sparse household resources. When schools reopened after six months of closure in Uganda, 10 percent of grade 10 girls failed to return compared to 8 percent of grade 10 boys. Worse, 18 percent of grade 12 girls did not come back compared to 2 percent of grade 12 boys. A survey of nearly 4,000 adolescents living in urban settlements and rural counties in Kenya found that 16 percent of vulnerable adolescent girls compared to 8 percent of adolescent boys did not return to school when schools reopened in the country in January 2021.
The primary driver of dropout for girls has been economic—compounded by pregnancy.
A study of nearly 400 of the hardest-to-reach rural adolescent girls in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda found that 34 percent had lost a parent or guardian to COVID-19, 70 percent had to pursue income-generating activities, and 86 percent could not afford to return to school. Such economic precarity can drive adolescent girls into transactional sex to meet their basic needs. One study of adolescents in Nairobi, Kenya found that COVID-19 has increased young women’s financial dependence on transactional sex by 49 percent. Beyond economic precarity, the study of the hardest-to-reach adolescent girls also found that 29 percent of girls had dropped out of school during COVID. More than half of these girls dropped out because they were or recently had been pregnant. And of the girls who were planning to return to school, 30 percent were pregnant.
The mental health and psychosocial well-being of adolescent girls has quickly become a concern.
School closures, barriers to distance learning, economic insecurity, food insecurity, gender-based violence, and the health risks of COVID-19 have all increased adolescent girls’ concerns and feelings of hopelessness about their own educational futures. An earlier study of COVID-19 in Kenya found that older adolescent girls (15-19 years) were less likely to be engaged in distance learning, less confident that they would return to school, and more likely to experience symptoms of depression than younger adolescent girls (10-14 years). The aforementioned study on the hardest-to-reach adolescent girls in eastern Africa indicates high levels of academic anxiety among girls concerning their learning loss, the degree of remedial learning they will need, and the likelihood of having to repeat a grade and thus be much older than their peers.
Social stigma against teenage pregnancy magnifies these anxieties for many girls.
Pregnant girls who feel ashamed and fear being mocked by peers self-isolate further. For those who experienced sexual violence, the added trauma of abuse—oftentimes by men in their own household—adds another source of psychological stress and distress. Social stigma around their pregnancy not only puts them at greater risk of depression, but also places them even further out of reach from social support. Although communities in eastern Africa largely support adolescent girls returning to school, the situation is different for pregnant girls. Adolescent girls report how social stigma around teenage pregnancy mixes with a toxic school culture to push pregnant girls and school-aged mothers out of school.
COVID-19 is far from over, but we know enough about its impact to suggest immediate actions governments can take in response.
It is unclear which of the trends (both the positive and negative) that have emerged thus far will be sustained through repeated school closures and successive waves of COVID-19 variants. What is clear is that governments should factor the following into their COVID-19 education response and recovery plans:
Disaggregate reenrollment data by gender, age, wealth, and other intersecting factors that may shape the consequences of COVID-related school closures. While aggregate studies point to a surprisingly low dropout rate among girls, those studies that looked specifically at adolescent girls point to a very different picture. Girls and boys of different ages, of different wealth strata, and from rural or urban households experience different risks and different expectations and pressures on their time. Decisionmakers must take seriously these intersecting constraints, vulnerabilities, and associated risks to education continuity and recovery.
Weigh the health benefits of school closures against the known education, economic, social, and health costs—including the cost to mental health. The impacts of school closures on vulnerable segments of the population are severe and costly. Governments should factor in these costs when making decisions about school closures and find other ways to serve these populations if/when schools must be closed.
Design and implement school reentry policies for pregnant girls. The Ministry of Education in Kenya has shown that school dropout need not be a pregnant girls’ destiny. During the first year of the pandemic, the country saw a 131 percent increase in the number of girls who completed their secondary school exams in the hospital after giving birth, rising from 282 girls in 2019 to 652 in 2020. Elsewhere, pregnant girls are de facto expelled from school.
Address the education, economic, social, and health needs (including physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health) of adolescents. Emerging evidence clearly indicates how these needs intersect in complex ways, creating vulnerabilities that are especially unique to adolescent girls. Addressing these needs holistically—including through government and nongovernmental support, like cash transfers, in response to COVID-related job loss and food insecurity—will mitigate against the pathways that lead to adolescent girls’ unintended pregnancies and school dropout.
We are no longer dealing with hypothetical impacts on girls’ education. The studies highlighted above point to the ways COVID-19 has already disrupted the educational trajectories of adolescent girls in long-lasting ways. As COVID-19 continues to evolve, we must marshal these insights to dampen its ongoing effects on girls’ education.
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Quantifying the impact on Nigeria of the African Continental Free Trade Area
While there is a general optimism around the promise of the newly in-force African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), like any other free trade agreement (FTA), it will inevitably create winners and losers. This unequal distributional impact is a function of many possible factors, including manufacturing capacity, domestic costs of doing business, firm productivity, infrastructural capability, AfCFTA awareness levels, and access to loans and financing. Whether due to firm-level inefficiencies, information frictions, or the suboptimal business environments, some firms—or even sectors—within a country may be unable to expand market opportunities as competition from other continental economies rises. The AfCFTA drops 90 percent of tariffs and includes policies aimed at eliminating nontariff barriers, such as customs delays, so the aggregate long-term benefits of AfCFTA are likely to be substantial and larger than potential losses; however, some countries and sectors will likely be impacted negatively in the short term.
Nigeria—the largest economy in Africa—signed the AfCFTA on July 7, 2019, becoming the 34th member of the trading bloc. Under the AfCFTA, Nigeria stands to gain from increased access to cheaper goods and services from other African countries, as its intra-African trade is currently low: Indeed, as of 2018, Nigeria’s imports from the African region relative to total imports was at 3.2 percent while the share of Nigeria’s exports to the African region relative to total exports was 13.2 percent. Moreover, in 2020, Nigeria’s main trading partner was actually China.
Proponents of the FTA expect the AfCFTA to reduce poverty, increase firm competitiveness, and boost intra-African trade and investment. In fact, based on a recent survey of 1,804 Nigerian manufacturing enterprises, 6 out of 10 businesses expect the AfCFTA to lead to a reduction in material and labor costs, increase production capacity, expand market and consumer size, and reduce prices. Overall, Nigeria’s small and medium-sized businesses are optimistic about the opportunities created by AfCFTA, although with mixed feelings grounded in concerns about rising foreign competition and dumping of substandard goods.
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As the trade agreement kicked off in the middle of a global pandemic coupled with a global recession, it is still unclear how the reduction in tariffs on goods and services will impact Nigeria’s households and businesses. However, a 2020 piece by Nassim Oulmane, Mustapha Sadni Jallab, and Patrice Rélouendé Zidouemba argues that the AfCFTA’s boost to intra-African trade might actually mitigate the rapid decline in GDP caused by COVID-19 and subsequent social-distancing policies and border closures.
Estimating the impacts of the AfCFTA for Nigeria
A tariff reduction enacted by one country has implications for its partners, suppliers, and competitors as it spills over to the rest of the world through trade networks and to other industries through supply chains. (For instance, a reduction in tariffs on cotton products impacts the prices of textiles.) These cascading effects across sectors and countries can be captured using a tractable numerical framework that can simulate the effects of shocks to countries and sectors and its implication on global trade patterns. To identify these effects and the transmission mechanisms resulting from the change in relative prices from trade liberalization on producers and consumers of intermediate and final goods at home and abroad, we employ a multisector, multicountry, quantitative model with linkages across sectors. A regional tariff reduction is modeled as a higher productivity, as it leads to a reduction in relative prices and has implications for the exchange of goods across countries and regions. In this framework, households and firms then purchase more imported articles at cheaper prices, raising trade volumes and increasing household welfare. For the same reason, changes in relative prices of exports and imports induce higher demand for non-Nigerian-made products, depending on the variation in prices across sectors and countries. Therefore, even though there is a presumption of a positive impact, that may not be the case.
Figure 1. Predicted aggregate real wage effects (%) of the AfCFTA on Nigeria and rest of the world
Source: Static computable, multisector, multicountry trade model version, authors’ simulations.
Notes: A country’s real wage effect is the percentage change in real GDP from 2014 level associated with free trade across the African region only. Tariffs for other non-AfCFTA countries/region are set at 2014 effective rates. Declines in GDP are shown in red, whereas increases in GDP are in orange and blue. The model provides results for 27 African countries, 13 OECD countries, 14 other emerging economies, and the “rest” of Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, North America, and Australia (60 countries in total including the rest of the world). Simulation results assume a full employment, perfect foresight, and absence of trade imbalances and household’s dynamic intertemporal choices.
Quantifying real wage, price, trade, and welfare effects
In our analysis, we calibrate a model of trade to countries’ macroeconomic performance as at 2014 and then simulate the potential impacts on macroeconomic indicators associated with trade liberalization across the African region. We estimate the impacts on all countries under a scenario where there is free trade only with continental countries. Figure 1 presents the estimated percentage change in real wage associated with moving from tariff rates in 2014 to those under the AfCFTA for African countries, while tariff rates on other regions/countries remain at 2014 effective tariff rates. Our results have implications on real wage and welfare effects for Nigeria, 52 countries, six other regions of the world, and the rest of the world. Overall, we find that Nigeria will experience a 1.43 percent gain in value added compared to 2014 levels. Notably, the effects for Nigeria, although positive, are modest relative to the gains in real wage for other African countries. Our findings show that the AfCFTA will deliver larger gains to African countries with prior larger shares of imports from the region. Moreover, impacts of trade liberalization on real wage across African countries will be uneven: For example, Botswana, Angola, and Ghana will experience percentage changes in real wage of 16.6 percent, 12.5 percent, and 6.5 percent (dark blue in map), respectively, due to the AfCFTA.
Nigeria gains 1.55 percent in welfare. Decomposing welfare effects into effects due to change in volume of trade (1.14 percent) and effects due to change in terms of trade (0.41 percent) highlights the sources of Nigeria’s positive gain by sector. As shown in Figure 2, agriculture and fishing and other manufacturing industries account for 73 percent of the gains from volume of trade. A decline in terms of trade translates to a larger decline in export prices relative to import prices. “Other manufacturing goods” accounts for most gains in terms of trade while the agriculture and mining industries combined dilute gains by 32.6 percent.
Figure 2. Effect of AfCFTA on Nigeria’s volume of trade and terms of trade by sector
Source: Static computable, multisector, multicountry trade model version, authors’ simulations.
Notes: Volume of trade is sectoral trade relative to Nigeria’s total trade. Terms of trade is calculated as difference in sectoral price of export and import as a share of total price differences in all sectors. Welfare effects is the sum of the volume of trade (VoT) and terms of trade (ToT) effects. A negative ToT means the sector dilutes the positive gains. Sectoral contribution for ToT and VoT adds up to 100 percent.
Prices for agricultural and manufacturing commodities will go down, but some others will go up
Based on our simulations, the AfCFTA will lead to reductions in prices of agricultural and manufacturing commodities. In fact, the decline in sectoral prices ranges from 0.8 percent in electrical and machinery to 8 percent in metal (Figure 3). Moreover, through sectoral linkages and changes in relative prices of imported goods, we find the AfCFTA will lead to an increase in prices of non-tradable services such as information services; transportation and warehousing; and finance and insurance services.
Figure 3. Price effects of AfCFTA on Nigeria’s economic sectors
Source: Static computable, multisector, multicountry trade model version, authors’ simulations.
Even with better infrastructure under the AfCFTA and the under-construction train networks between Kaduna and Lagos (the commercial center of Nigeria, which hosts the maritime ports for articles traded to/from the southern and western parts of Africa), intra- and international transportation costs remain high in the short run. A recent article in Nigerian newspaper The Punch finds that the price of shipping a container from the Apapa port in Lagos to the mainland (distance of just 20 kilometers) is almost the same as shipping one container from Nigeria to China. These types of costs will rise as the AfCFTA is implemented because of increases in the demand for inter-country haulage and shipping. In other words, intra-regional transportation cost variation impacts production costs and prices of traded articles as well as trade flows across countries. Changes in trade patterns then drive the uneven distributional impacts on consumption, real wage, and welfare across regions and countries, depending on changes in tariff rates on traded products.
Before the AfCFTA, 38 percent of Nigeria’s exports were in the mining and petro-chemical industries. Now, our simulations suggest a slight decline in exports for the following sectors: mining; wood and paper; petro-chemicals; metal products; and other manufacturing articles. Successful implementation of the AfCFTA will also induce a 6.3 percent increase in exports of agricultural products and 1.3 percent increase in food and beverage exports as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Export effects of AfCFTA on the Nigerian economy
Source: Static computable, multisector, multicountry, trade model version, authors’ simulations. U.N. Commodity trade database.
Notes: Before AfCFTA’s export share is based on UNCOMTRADE data, and After AfCFTA is based on simulation results.
As touted by policy experts, the AfCFTA has the potential to lift Nigerians out of poverty and raise manufacturing output. However, to realize this potential, Nigeria must follow targeted industrial policy and structural reforms; upgrade customs infrastructure; address the domestic cost of doing business; reduce bottlenecks, port processes, and transportation costs; promote digital marketing and e-commerce; and create targeted awareness about the AfCFTA policy. A survey of Nigerian businesses conducted by the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA) shows that over 60 percent of Nigeria’s businesses are still unaware of the recently signed AfCFTA agreement. Even with potential benefits for firms, there are information costs reflected in different levels of awareness. Firms who don’t know AfCFTA exists are unable to take advantage of the tariff arrangements or even benefit from the policy. Until businesses are aware, the costs of trading under AFCFTA will remain high.
Note: The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Federal Reserve System, nor the Brookings Institution.
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