possibly out-of-school), the elderly or the sick (in increased numbers due to the pandemic). On the other hand, boys were expected to participate more in income-generating activities to substitute for pandemicrelated reductions in household income. Both mechanisms could potentially affect school attendance and the likelihood of dropping out.<sup>2</sup> Another concern is girls’ school dropout due to child marriage, which has been observed as a coping mechanism in times of economic vulnerability. The decrease in household income during a pandemic or other economic shock can incentivize families to marry their children early, who will then leave the household and thus reduce the household spending needs. An increase in child marriage is in turn related to an increase in early pregnancies, and a high likelihood of permanently leaving school. This notion is partly based on the experiences from the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, where Bandiera et al. (2020) documented a large decline in adolescent girls’ school enrollment post crisis, partly linked to an increase in sexual exploitation and abuse and early pregnancies.<sup>3</sup> By now, schools have fully reopened across Sub-Saharan Africa, yet evidence on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent girls’ and boys’ school attendance remains scarce.

A comprehensive 2021 study by UNESCO, informed by expert opinions, a literature review and detailed research in five developing countries, finds that the gendered impacts of COVID-19 are rather contextspecific, with girls being more at risk of dropping out in some contexts and boys in others. The study emphasizes that although disparities in returning to school emerged between adolescents by gender, the report did not find any conclusive evidence of increases in gender-based violence, early marriage, and pregnancies. In a desktop review, Moscoviz and Evans (2022), argue that “girls in Sub-Saharan Africa were particularly vulnerable during school disruptions”. However, these findings are based on a few case studies, some of which have samples that are not nationally representative (e.g., Zulaika et al. 2022 for Kenya).

While several other studies have documented declines in children’s school attendance during the first months of the pandemic (e.g., Dang et al. 2021; Bundervoet et al. 2021), none of these investigate gender differences specifically. Although Bundervoet et al (2021) and Furbush et al (2021) both use empirical methods and data that are similar to the ones used in this paper, they focus only on household-level school attendance data (more widely available than individual-level data), and do not analyze the differences in the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact by gender or other individual-level characteristics.

To the best of our knowledge, this study presents the most comprehensive analysis of individual-level school attendance of adolescent girls and boys over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. We draw on specialized rounds of high frequency phone surveys conducted over the course of the pandemic in six African countries that collect sex-disaggregated data on school attendance. This allows us to piece together a picture of how adolescent boys’ and girls’ school attendance evolved between,

> 2 While evidence on the impacts of aggregate shocks in low-income countries is limited, the existing studies suggest that in poorer environments, investments in human capital such as education and health are pro-cyclical and tend to decline during economic crises. Several studies have also found that the effect of crises on adolescents' health or education tends to be worse for girls (Ferreira and Shady, 2009).

> 3 On the other hand, new evidence by Yao et al (2021) shows that although the Ebola outbreak had clear shortterm negative impacts, school attendance has returned to the long-term trend merely four years after the crisis. At this point in time, there were no more discernible effects on school attendance trends for children from vulnerable backgrounds.

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