costs would be higher for students in grade 12 than in grades 4 or 8. Estimated impacts of the partial reopening are smaller when including households with grade 12 children in the sample (Table A3). Given expected differences in school-related costs, net childcare burden, and child agricultural labor by student grade, smaller increases in parent work hours for a grade 12 student returning to school relative to a younger student suggest childcare burdens are the main mechanism, rather than schoolrelated costs and child agricultural labor.

# **5 Discussion**

How do the labor supply effects of the positive shock of partial school reopenings compare to the initial labor supply reductions at the onset of the pandemic in Kenya? Using recall data on respondents’ labor supply in February 2020, we find that labor participation across adults ages 18-64 in Kenya fell from 76% before the pandemic to 59% in May-July.Average working hours in the last 7 days also fell, from 23.9 hours in February to 16.9 hours in May-July.<sup>17</sup> For respondents ages 18-64 in our analysis sample households, average weekly hours fell from 30.4 in February to 19.3 in May-July. Adult work hours in the last 7 days increased by 3.6 after the partial reopening, corresponding to 32.4% of the pandemic reduction in work hours in this sample.

The partial reopening only affected a subset of children older than those with the greatest childcare needs, whereas initial closures affected all school-age children. Reducing labor supply is also likely easier than increasing it, reflected in the lack of significant impacts of the partial reopening outside of household agriculture hours. Considering impacts of the partial school reopening should thus provide a conservative estimate of the contribution of school closures to initial pandemic labor participation decreases.

Increasing work hours for adults in households with school-age children (66.4% of households) during the school closure period by our estimate of the amount they increased due to the partial reopening reduces the drop in average work hours from February to May-July among all adults nationally from 7.0 hours to 4.8 hours. We therefore estimate that school closures account for (at least) 30% of the pandemic decrease in work hours.

Across Kenya’s labor force of 23.7 million (ILO 2021), a reduction of 2.2 work hours per week over the period of the school closures adds up to over 2.1 billion hours, or USD 2.96 billion at the average hourly income observed in our sample—3.1% of Kenya’s 2019 GDP. This is a simplified back-of-the-envelope calculation making many assumptions and focusing just on labor supply of adults in the household, but provides a likely conservative rough estimate of the magnitude of the labor supply impact of Kenya’s school closures.

A better understanding of the labor supply impacts of school closures may inform discussion of school closures as a policy response to a resurgent COVID-19 or a future pandemic.

Although the childcare shock we analyze takes place in the context of a global pandemic, the results on labor supply impacts will continue to have relevance as the pandemic is unfortunately

> 17. Among those working, hours fell from 39.7 to 29.2.

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