## **Table 1. Remote** **<u>and Alternative Education</u>**

||(1)<br>RemoteE|(2)<br> ducation|(3)<br>Alternative|(4)<br>Education<br>|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Female|0.022|0.062**|0.047|0.085|
||(0.018)|(0.031)|(0.056)|(0.073)|
|Poor|-0.060**|-0.007|0.094|0.143*|
||(0.028)|(0.017)|(0.058)|(0.084)|
|Female * Poor||-0.109**<br>(0.047)||-0.101<br>(0.106)|
|Child Hunger|-0.040**|-0.046**|0.163*|0.157*|
||(0.017)|(0.018)|(0.089)|(0.089)|
|Urban|0.002|-0.003|-0.031|-0.035|
||(0.016)|(0.017)|(0.063)|(0.062)|
|Head Tertiary|0.046*|0.048*|0.076|0.078|
|Education|||||
||(0.027)|(0.026)|(0.079)|(0.079)|
|Female Head|0.031**|0.029*|0.015|0.013|
||(0.016)|(0.015)|(0.054)|(0.053)|
|Power Grid|-0.033|-0.035*|-0.031|-0.033|
||(0.022)|(0.021)|(0.063)|(0.061)|
|Public School|0.043|0.045|0.081|0.083|
||(0.050)|(0.048)|(0.078)|(0.078)|
|County FE|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Control|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|R2|0.18|0.20|0.26|0.27|
|N|2005|2005|2005|2005|

_Significance levels:_ * p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01. Standard errors (svy) in parentheses. Children younger than 3 years old were excluded from the sample. County fixed effects. Data from wave 3. Control variables: age, age squared, no. children (log), anxious due to outbreak, week count.

On the other hand, children who live in households in which the head is college-educated are almost 5 percentage points more likely to learn remotely.<sup>28</sup> Given that poverty is controlled for, this result shows that the benefit of parents’ education for children goes beyond material advantages, and may improve their ability to engage with and influence their children as well as teachers to increase the chances that their children continue to learn even if remotely (Reeves and Venator 2014).<sup>29</sup> These disparities in access to remote learning are not only troubling on its own, but may end up widening other pre-existing inequalities long after the outbreak is contained (Zintl and Melia 2020).

Additionally, if the household head is a woman, children in the household are around 3 percentage points more likely to engage in remote education, consistent with the evidence that women treat the pandemic as a more serious threat than men (Galasso et al. 2020).<sup>30</sup> Considering the rather low mean value of the dependent variable between September and November 2020 (0.047), the magnitude of all of these coefficients is quite substantial.<sup>31</sup>

# _5.1.2. Alternative Education_

Contrary to remote education, the divide in the take-up of alternative education is less severe. This is consistent with community and self-directed learning being more accessible to different segments of the population – almost half of Kenyan children engaged in at least some form of alternative education when

> 28 It is important to note that tertiary education in particular matters in this case. Replacing it with an indicator for secondary education yields insignificant results.

> 29 In fact, almost one-fifth of households with college-educated heads in our sample are poor, indicating that the benefit of parental education goes beyond income.

> 30 In our data, households with female heads do not differ significantly (on average) from those led by men neither in terms of poverty nor level of education.

> 31 The findings presented in Table 1 are mostly robust to the use of nonlinear (probit) models (Table A3).

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