Two months later, in July 2020, the government announced that the entire school year, which runs from January to November, would be cancelled and children would be expected to repeat their grade once schools reopened. Education officials later changed plans and allowed schools to partially reopen in October 2020, with priority given to children preparing for national exams in grades 4 and 8 (Dahir 2020; Gikandi 2020). Only in January 2021, nine months after the initial closure, were all Kenyan schools reopened for all grades, making Kenya the last East African country to fully reopen schools (Mlaba 2021; Parsitau and Jepkemei 2020). Thousands of children (mostly girls), however, did not come back to schools once they reopened (Mlaba 2021). For instance, at the beginning of 2021, 8 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls in the target counties (Nairobi, Kisumu, Kilifi and Wajir) did not return to school (Population Council 2021). Figure 1 above offers a timeline of the most relevant policy changes, as well as the interview periods from the first five waves of the RRPS. In this study, we rely mostly on data from waves three to five (September 2020 to June 2021) – that is, before and after school closures.

# 4. Data and Methodology

To analyze the impact of the pandemic for children in Kenya, we take advantage of the Kenya COVID19 rapid-response phone survey (RRPS) for households. Conducted 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, the RRPS consists of a panel survey that captures the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Kenyan nationals, refugees and stateless people.<sup>9</sup> Since May 2020, households have been contacted by phone every two months and asked a broad set of questions, ranging from basic socio-economic characteristics to knowledge of COVID-19.<sup>10</sup> The questionnaire includes, in addition to most core questions used in the global template of the World Bank and a subsample of questions from the ECD COVID-19 survey monitoring parental support, questions about children internalizing and externalizing behaviors, as well as specific questions designed to better understand the consequences of COVID-19 for the Kenyan population.<sup>11</sup> The interviews could be conducted in a series of different languages, including Swahili, Luo, Arabic, French, Kirundi, Luganda, Oromo, Somali, Kinyarwanda, Tigrinya, Nuer and Dinka, according to the respondent’s preference. By combining a nationally representative sample – randomly drawn from the 2015/16 Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey (KIHBS) and stratified by county and place of residence – with additional samples of randomly-drawn mobile-phone owners (not stratified) and of refugees and stateless people (stratified by location), the final sample is representative of the Kenyan population using mobile phones, which accounts for 80 percent of the population (KNBS 2019). The RRPS is then re-weighted to make it as representative as possible of the entire Kenyan population.<sup>12</sup> Since most questions that are specifically about young children have been introduced in the third wave of the survey, between September 18 and November 28, 2020, we take this to be our baseline period. The analysis extends up to June 14, 2021, and thus also includes waves four (between January 25 and

> teaching and learning materials, and to expand existing distance-learning programs; (iii) to train teachers to effectively support distance learning, including monitoring and assessment; (iv) to develop, and implement intervention programs targeting the marginalized and most vulnerable learners especially the girls and learners with special needs; and (v) to provide psychosocial support to learners, teachers, education officials and other stakeholders (Republic of Kenya Ministry of Education 2020).

> 9 A target respondent in each household has been followed throughout all waves, but as there are cases in which the person could not be reached or stated that no longer wished to be contacted, we end up with an unbalanced panel.

> 10 We define households as “a person, or group of people, that eat from the same pot and spend four nights or more in an average week sleeping in the same home.” This is comparable to the definition used by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS 2018), but slightly simplified to ease implementation via phone survey. 11 The questionnaire is available here.

> 12 More information about the survey as well as a dashboard to monitor some of the key indicators are available <u>here.</u>

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