In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures and online learning. Countries with robust systems and prior investment, including World Bank support, were better prepared to provide learning continuity. The countries that were best positioned to do so had prior experience (such as Sierra Leone, which reached 1.4 million pupils); had already developed remote learning curricula (such as Turkey, which reached 18 million pupils), had trained teachers in remote learning practices(such as Nigeria’s Edo State, which reached 260,000 students), and/or had appropriate technology in place to reach students and had invested in student engagement (such as Peru, where 4.5 million students logged on each month).
Challenge
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was facing a learning and skills crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic deepened this crisis. School closures have led to huge learning losses with children in Learning Poverty (defined as the proportion of 10-year-old children unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text) rising from 57.1 percent in 2019 to an estimated 70 percent in 2022. Beyond reduced incomes, learning losses can lead to lower productivity, greater inequality, and increased risks of social unrest for decades to come. These trends can be reversed if countries act quickly, decisively, and with adequate resources to recover lost learning, guided by evidence on what works. Learning from these experiences will inform better education systems that are ready to deal with the next crisis.
During the COVID-19 crisis, one billion children missed one year of schooling, and of these children 700 million missed a total of 1.5 years of education. Many countries were ill-prepared for the extensive school closures, but the few with prior experience of remote learning, trained teachers, appropriate technology, and engaged learners provided learning continuity during the crisis.
Middle- and high-income environments mostly deployed online learning systems, allowing for teacher-student interaction and engagement more or less in real time. Low-income and Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) affected environments often lack wide-spread access to electricity, connectivity, and devices that would make sophisticated remote learning possible. Only three of 54 Low-Income and FCV-affected countries have internet penetration rates above 50 percent. Instead, they deployed more basic technology solutions (principally radio and television).
Approach
The World Bank Group now aims to help countries with two related challenges: first, to recover the learning lost during school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic; second, to build the crisis-readiness of education systems so that they are more resilient to shocks in future.
To tackle learning losses, the WBG is using an expanding portfolio, strengthened by the Learning Poverty policy commitments, to prioritize the following approaches:
- First, keep schools open and increase instructional time.
- Second, assess students and equip teachers to match instruction to students’ levels of learning.
- Third, streamline the curriculum and focus on foundational learning so that teachers and students target their efforts more effectively.
- Fourth, promote national political commitment for learning recovery, guided by credible measurement of learning. Political leaders must become aware of the seriousness of the learning crisis and make it a top priority by devoting the necessary human, management, and financial resources to learning recovery.
Results
Since early 2020, the World Bank Group has supported 479 million students in formal and informal education across pre-primary, primary, secondary, tertiary, and vocational education. The examples below demonstrate the experiences of a few countries that were able to provide continuity of learning through the largest-ever global school closure.
Sierra Leone – building on prior experience
Sierra Leone provides an example of learning from previous crises to prepare for interruptions in education. The largest-ever recorded Ebola outbreak struck West Africa in 2014, and Sierra Leone shut down schools to prevent spread of the disease. With support from its partners, including quickly re-allocated funds from a Global Partnership for Education grant, the government developed remote learning tools to provide instruction to students during this period. Lessons were pre-recorded, broadcast on radio and TV for three hours every day, and a phone line was opened at the end of each segment to allow children to call in with their questions and receive “live” answers. In addition to core subjects across Grades 1–12, instruction also included other important topics, such as psychosocial and life skills, hygiene and handwashing, and basic information on Ebola.
In 2020 schools closed again due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sierra Leone was already working with the World Bank, OECD, Harvard Global Education Innovation Initiative, and HundrED, a non-profit organization focused on K-12 schooling, in a project called Rising Academy Network. To respond to school closures, the government created a free remote learning program with 20 week-long sessions, using radio scripts and SMS content for parents. The project built on experience from the Ebola outbreak with distance learning, to provide learning continuity for 1.4 million children as well as essential training for 22,000 teachers.
Nigeria - teachers ready and able to deliver content in digital formats
Within four months of the first COVID-19-related school closures, the state of Edo in Nigeria launched Edo-BEST@Home, a public-private partnership between Edo state, the World Bank, and New Globe, a United Kingdom-based organization focused on creating technology-enabled education systems. This initiative provided a fully online remote learning program.
Because access to devices and connectivity varied across Edo state, Edo-BEST@Home focused on delivering content and learning activities through mobile phones. Coaches supported teachers while they were using the Edo-BEST@Home platform and virtual classrooms. Teachers could answer students’ questions through the virtual classrooms, grade students’ homework and provide feedback, and communicate with both students and parents through phone calls, text messages, and WhatsApp. By mid-July 2020, Edo State’s remote learning program reached 930 out of 1,000 primary schools in the state and over 7,000 virtual classrooms were created to deliver remote education.
Turkey - building on an existing digital program
Turkey responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by introducing remote learning in March 2020 through its existing online digital education system (Eğitim Bilişim Ağı or EBA, launched in 2012) and EBA TV; EBA virtual classrooms followed in April 2020. EBA is available to teachers, students, and parents and includes more than 1,600 courses and 20,000 items of video, audio, documents, infographics, and interactive content for learning designed for 18 million students from preschool to 12th grade, including supporting materials for teachers, tests, and exams.
To support these efforts, the World Bank has been working with the Ministry of National Education in the Safe Schooling and Distance Learning Project, approved in June 2020 with funding of $160 million. 11.8 million students, the equivalent of 70 percent of the student population, are recorded as having benefitted from EBA.
Peru - promoting teacher effectiveness and learning engagement
Peru’s Ministry of Education, supported by the World Bank reacted quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic with “Aprendo en Casa” (“I learn at home”), a comprehensive multimodal strategy to deliver remote learning at scale, in less than two weeks.
Access to devices and connectivity needed for remote learning varied across the country. Authorities used TV, radio, and internet modalities to deliver remote learning solutions, enabling “Aprendo en Casa” to reach 7.2 million students. With its radio learning program, Peru’s government partnered with over 1,100 local radio stations to reach students in remote areas and created content delivered in Spanish and nine Indigenous languages.
Regular teacher-student interaction has been key to ensuring high take-up and engagement. By May 2021, 77 percent of students and parents had received support from teachers at least once in the past week and 89 percent of students and parents were satisfied with the communication.
