Like many other countries, however, Kenya had limited infrastructure set up, prior to the pandemic, making it difficult to carry out a swift transition to remote learning or to ensure that children could safely and quickly return to classrooms (UNESCO 2019).<sup>3</sup> In fact, during the first months of the COVID-19 crisis, early assessments indicate that only 22 percent of Kenyan children had access to digital learning, and that children in private schools were twice as likely to learn remotely than their counterparts in public school. In addition, parents cited poverty as the main challenge to accessing digital learning and reported having difficulties supporting home-based learning. Coupled with increased family expectations and anxiety, this exposed many parents to mental health challenges and had negative effects on child development (Uwezo 2020).

With the goal of drawing a comprehensive picture of the impact of the pandemic on Kenyan children throughout and after school closures, this paper takes advantage of Kenya’s rapid-response phone surveys (RRPS) with more than 5,000 households.<sup>4</sup> We examine two sets of questions in particular. First, to what extent the take-up of remote and alternative learning options – as well as the rates of return to school, once the restrictions were lifted – differed according to socio-economic characteristics. Second, how the COVID-19 crisis affected children’s emotional well-being, and whether this is mediated by the form of learning – i.e., remotely, community-based, or in-person.

Our empirical analysis is organized in chronological order. The first part encompasses the interviews held between September and November 2020 (wave three of the RRPS), and thus corresponds to the period in which most schools were closed.<sup>5</sup> Given these circumstances, the outcomes of interest in this part are twofold: access to remote learning and to alternative forms of education (in both cases conditional on not attending school). The data from the period between January and June 2021 (waves four and five of RRPS) provide the basis for the second part of our analysis, in which we examine children’s return to school as well as potential consequences for their emotional well-being. In both parts, aware of the concerns raised in the recent literature, we assess whether the pandemic has disproportionately affected underprivileged groups of children, including those from poorer and lesseducated households, as well as girls, who already faced additional obstacles to continuing their education before the COVID-19 crisis (O’Donnell, Akmal and Hares 2020).

For children from deprived households, the COVID-19 crisis might eventually tip the balance in favor of dropping out of school prematurely, as they are more likely expected to provide additional support at home due to decreased family earnings and less likely to have access to education modalities when schools close. To analyze whether this is the case (at least in the short run), our analysis includes three sets of household characteristics to help identify the most important barriers to accessing (remote) education: (i) poverty and infrastructure, (ii) location and remoteness, and (iii) parent (or head of household) education levels.

We find that the pandemic and the public policies that ensued have widened the gap in access to education in particular along income lines, with poorer children falling further behind during school closures. Girls living in poor households have been especially vulnerable. Moreover, we document a significant increase in the number of reported cases of negative alterations in children’s externalizing and internalizing behavior throughout the first term of 2021. After schools reopened, children learning remotely or through alternative means were more likely than those who were back in school to suffer from these disruptions in emotional well-being.

This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we review the recent literature on the consequences of school closures and reopening. We provide more background information for the Kenyan context in Section 3 and, in Section 4, describe the data and the methodology. Section 5 presents the findings from

> 3 According to UNESCO (2019), almost half of the world’s out-of-school children live in Sub-Saharan Africa. 4 The Kenyan RRPS is implemented by the World Bank, in partnership with the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the University of California, Berkeley, since May 2020.

> 5 Our analysis does not include waves 1 and 2 of the RRPS because most of the questions related to education and children’s well-being only become available in wave 3.

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