# **4. School attendance of adolescent boys and girls over the course of the pandemic**

Table 1 shows for each country-round the share of children aged 10-18 attending school and the status of school closures. The data document that the COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruptions in school attendance for adolescents in many Sub-Saharan African countries. For example, in Kenya, only 16 percent of children aged 10-17 years attended school between September and November 2020. Similarly, in Uganda, only 32 percent of children aged 10-18 years were reported to attend school between March and April 2021. In both situations, schools were closed due to COVID-19, with some concessions for exam candidates. Pre-COVID-19 household surveys conducted in both countries suggest that prior to the pandemic between 85 and 92 percent of children in these age groups were attending school, indicating a massive disruption in education for millions of adolescent girls and boys.

At the same time, school attendance rates fluctuated significantly over the course of the pandemic, as schools cycled through periods of closures and re-openings. Encouragingly, the data suggest that many children did return to school once they reopened. For example, in Kenya, 99 percent of children aged 1017 were attending school between January and March 2021, at a time when schools had fully reopened – a significant recovery from 16 percent just four months earlier. Likewise, in Nigeria attendance of children aged 10-18 years increased from 59 percent in October 2020, when schools were partially closed due to COVID-19, to 82 percent in March 2021, when schools had reopened. These are early and preliminary results – but they do give rise to the hope that the COVID-19 crisis did not necessarily lead to the massive dropout rates that were initially feared. However, it will be necessary to closely monitor these trends going forward, as there is a risk that children, who regressed in learning during COVID-19, may struggle with the new curriculum and drop out in the months or years that follow.

These sharp fluctuations also imply that routine data collections are necessary during the pandemic to monitor the situations on the ground. However, even high-frequency phone surveys, which collect household-level information on children’s school attendance, only provide a very partial picture as there can be significant intra-household variability. The data used in this paper were pre-selected for the availability of individual-level data on school attendance. In what follows, we turn to gender differences as one important dimension of intra-household variation.

**Table 1: School attendance of adolescents before and during the pandemic, by country and survey round**

|**Country**|**Period (survey)**|**% of children aged**<br>**10-18**<br>**attending**<br>**school***|**% of children aged**<br>**10-18**<br>**attending**<br>**school inperson**|**School status**|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Burkina Faso|||||
||2018-19(LSMS)|59.9||Pre-COVID|
||Dec. 2020(HFPS R5)|71.6|71.6|Fullyopen**|
|Ethiopia|||||
||2018-9(LSMS)|72.4||Pre-COVID|
||Dec. 2020(HFPS R8)|77.6|51.8|Partiallyopen|
||April-May2021(HFPS R11)|78.4|76.7|Fullyopen|
|Kenya|||||
||2015-16(KIHBS)|91.8||Pre-COVID|
||Sep-Nov 2020(RRPS R3)|16.0||Partiallyopen|
||Jan-Mar 2021(RRPS R4)|99.2||Fullyopen|

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