enrollment drives. Countries should also use this opportunity to build a more resilient and inclusive education system that can continue to deliver learning in future crises.<sup>83</sup>

- Remote learning, now and in the future, can be made more effective by ensuring a multifaceted model and developing short-term and long-term learning plans.<sup>84</sup>

- Learning losses can be mitigated by adjusting expectations from the curriculum, and creating a rapid catch-up period once schools reopen (rather than forcing students through a curriculum for which they are far from ready).<sup>85</sup>

- Drop-outs may not need to materialize if school safety concerns are properly addressed and communicated with families, cash transfers reach the poorest (at a later stage) are tied to conditions of school re-enrollment for children, and policies and practices that prevent the enrolment of pregnant students are lifted.<sup>86</sup>

- Countries and development partners need to work together to build an understanding of what actions and interventions have been promoted by governments in response to COVID-19,<sup>87</sup> how households have perceived and taken up those actions,<sup>88</sup> and how effective those interventions actually were.<sup>89</sup>

According to global estimates of Learning Poverty, 53% of all children in the developing world cannot read and understand a simple paragraph by age 10.<sup>90</sup> The losses simulated here will make an already daunting challenge worse and will set the world back in its goal of helping every child learn the basics. The Learning Poverty target – which was to at least halve learning poverty to 27% by 2030 – was predicated on the assumption that countries could accelerate their performance to that of the 80<sup>th</sup> percentile of countries in their respective regions (Figure 12). Even if we were to assume that countries could accelerate their performance to this level as they re-open schools and address the challenges created by COVID-19, it would mean that the world will not halve Learning Poverty by 2030 – it will at best reach the learning poverty target by 2034.

83 Rogers and Sabarwal (2020). 84 For additional details please see World Bank (2020) available online at <u>http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/531681585957264427/Guidance-Note-on-Remote-Learning-andCOVID-19.</u>

> 85 See for instance the policy response options described in Rogers and Sabarwal (2020).

> 86 Al Tuwaijri et al. (2020).

> 87 UNESCO-UNICEF-World Bank are working on a joint Survey on National education responses to COVID-19. The first round has already been collected, and the team is moving to the second round. For more information please see <u>http://uis.unesco.org/en/news/survey-national-education-responses-covid-19-school-closures-due-12-june-2020</u> 88 Building on past experiences, such as the Listening to LAC, Listening to Africa, and Listening to Tajikistan, the World Bank is scaling up efforts to collect high frequency phone surveys of households in over 100 countries across all developing world to supports countries’ policy responses to COVID-19 (for more information see <u>https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/high-frequency-monitoring-covid-19-impacts).</u>

89 In March 2020, the World Bank in partnership with DFID, launched a specific windows of the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) intended to generate experimental and quasi-experimental evidence that would be immediately useful for countries’ education systems as they deal with the Covid-19 pandemic (for more information please see <u>https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/sief-trust-fund/brief/call-for-proposals-can-technologyaccelerate-learning-and-skills).</u> 90 <u>https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/immersive-story/2019/11/06/a-learning-target-for-a-learning-revolution</u> 30