approximately, mid-2020 and late 2021. Moreover, unlike other existing studies, this paper offers insights into what specific individual and household level characteristics correlate with girls’ and boys’ likelihood of returning to school after they reopened compared to before the pandemic. While the six countries with available survey data – Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda – are by no means representative of Sub-Saharan Africa at large, they do represent 460 million of Africa’s total population of 1.13 billion (41 percent) and capture a degree of the region’s geographic diversity.<sup>4</sup> This study makes the following contributions: First, we document the severe disruptions, but also large fluctuations, in school attendance of adolescents over the course of the pandemic. Second, we compare school attendance of adolescent girls and boys to assess the gender-specific impacts of the pandemic. Third, we conduct in-depth analysis to explore what individual- and household-level characteristics are associated with school dropouts of adolescent girls and boys in the context of the COVID-19 crisis.

This paper focuses on adolescent girls and boys aged 10 to 18 years. Adolescents are increasingly recognized as an important demographic group in international development programs, with needs and vulnerabilities that are distinct from both younger children and adults. Moreover, as most African countries have made progress towards universal primary education, pre-COVID-19 gender gaps in school attendance tended to be larger at the secondary level, which broadly overlaps with the age group considered in this study.<sup>5</sup> Our findings challenge the commonly held belief that the COVID-19 pandemic has widened gender gaps. Instead, our analysis indicates that in several countries, gender gaps have actually narrowed during the pandemic. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis shows that the pandemic has had a profound impact on factors that traditionally predict school attendance, such as being a descendent of the household head, parental education, and wealth. Specifically, our study reveals that these factors lost their salience in explaining school attendance post-pandemic, indicating that the pandemic has eroded some of the protective forces that were previously in place. These findings have important implications for policy makers seeking to address the impact of the pandemic, and aggregate shocks more broadly, on education and gender equality.

This paper is structured as follows. Sections 2 and 3 describe the data sources used in this study and the methodology. Section 4 presents descriptive evidence of adolescent girls’ and boys’ school attendance for six African countries – Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda. Section 5 conducts further in-depth analysis of the individual and household characteristics associated with not returning to school once they reopened, and tests specific hypotheses about what factors may affect adolescent girls’ and boys’ drop out. Section 6 concludes.

# **2. Data**

The main data sources used in this paper are the high-frequency phone surveys (HFPSs) and rapid response phone surveys (RRPSs) conducted by the World Bank and its partners (mostly national statistical offices) in more than 100 countries worldwide to monitor the pandemic’s evolving impacts on households

> 4 Population data from the World Bank’s Development Indicator (WDI) database. <u>https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators</u> 5 Secondary school age is approximately 12-17 years, but with some variations across countries.

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