our analysis. In Section 6, we offer concluding remarks and a brief discussion of the policy implications of our results.

# 2. Literature Review

## _2.1. Impacts of Closed Schools_

Evidence from past crises as well as preliminary studies on recent school closures indicate a challenging road ahead. First, as pandemics are not the only cause of school closures, we can draw important lessons from the impact of school closures caused by natural disasters or even just summer holidays. For instance, after the 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan, many schools in the surrounding area closed for 14 weeks. Four years later, children in schools affected by these short-term closures were almost 1.5 learning-adjusted years behind their peers enrolled in schools that remained open (Andrabi, Daniels and Das 2020). In the United States, a meta-study on summer learning losses reports that student achievement scores decline by one month of school-year learning while on holiday, and that reading gaps differ based on income level (Cooper at al. 1996).

These concerns are corroborated by initial assessments of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education. Kaffenberger (2020) estimates learning trajectories in low- and middle-income countries and predicts that children could lose more than a full year’s worth of learning from only three months of school closures. Azevedo et al. (2020) expect the current pandemic to lead to a loss of up to 0.9 schooling-adjusted years worldwide and predict a 25 percent increase in the share of lower secondaryaged children who will be below the minimum level of proficiency according to test scores. In the Netherlands, which experienced only a “short lockdown, [and provides] equitable school funding, and world-leading rates of broadband access” (Engzell et al. 2021, p. 1), and thus serves as a lower-bound estimate of the negative consequences of children being away from face-to-face education, children suffered an average learning loss equivalent to a fifth of a school year. The authors find that students from less-educated households were the ones hit the hardest by lockdown policies.

In a recent working paper highlighting different learning modalities during the pandemic, the authors found that although test scores declined across the United States during the 2020-21 school year, school districts that sustained higher rates of in-person education throughout this period fared better than those that relied to a larger extent on remote learning (Halloran et al. 2021). The authors estimate that districts with full face-to-face learning would present significantly smaller losses in math and English test scores (10.1 and 3.2 percentage points smaller, respectively) than districts that opted for fully virtual or hybrid education.

More broadly, however, efforts over the past several decades to improve technological access in classrooms have also showed positive signs. Programs such as “One-laptop-per-child” or Information and Technology Communications (ICT) classes have started to be implemented across the developing world to some success. In Peru, increasing children’s exposure to technology led to improvements in digital skills (Bet et al. 2014), and, in Kenya, the use of tablets in early grades is linked to better grades in English and Kiswahili (Piper et al. 2016).

What is clear is that most children affected by school closures will struggle, and governments worldwide need to react accordingly. Educational losses may be particularly severe in places that faced longer school closures and lack the appropriate infrastructure to at least mitigate the shock, as it is often the case in most of the developing world. In the spring of 2020, less than one-quarter of all low-income countries offered remote-learning options – and the most frequent offer was still TV or radio solutions. Without alternatives, almost 31 percent of children in school had no access to remote learning (UNICEF 2020b).

Across Africa, the adoption rate of remote learning has been slow. In early 2020, only 19 million of the 450 million children on the continent had access to edtech (Crawford 2020). Though governments throughout Sub-Saharan Africa strived to increase the supply to provide more remote options, only 23 percent of countries offered some combination of remote-learning strategies (radio, TV, Whatsapp, 4