Students in grades 4, 8, and 12 returned for Term 3 from January-March 2021 while other students returned for Term 2; their Term 3 was shifted to May-July 2021. Grade 8 and 12 students sat national exams in March-April. 2021 Term 1 for all students began in late July 2021. Terms and breaks for the 2021-2023 academic calendars were shortened to allow a gradual return to the standard pre-pandemic term schedule (running from January-October) in time for the 2024 academic year.

We focus on the impacts of the partial school reopening for several reasons. First, unlike initial school closures, the partial reopening did not coincide with other pandemic-related policies, allowing for cleaner identification. Second, we can exploit discontinuities in the timing that children enrolled in different grades were eligible to return to school to isolate the effect of the childcare shock. Further, because households vary in whether the students eligible for the partial reopening are net suppliers or demanders of childcare—depending on the presence of younger siblings—this shock sheds light on the importance of sibling-provided childcare.

# **2.2 Data**

Data come from the Kenya COVID-19 Rapid Response Phone Survey (RRPS) panel, collected by the World Bank in collaboration with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and the University of California at Berkeley (Pape 2021).<sup>4</sup> The main sample ( _∼_ 80%) is drawn from the nationallyrepresentative Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey conducted in 2015-2016, and this sample is supplemented by random digit dialing. The sample is intended to be representative of the population of Kenya using cell phones—80% of households nationally report owning a mobile phone, and these have better socioeconomic conditions on average than households that do not (Pape et al. 2021). We use data from the first four survey rounds, covering May 2020-March 2021. In addition, we construct measures for February 2020, before the first COVID-19 cases in Kenya, using recall questions from the first round.

The outcomes of interest are measures of labor supply.<sup>5</sup> The extensive margin is measured by participation in the last 7 days in three activities: employed/wage labor, household non-farm enterprise, and household agriculture. The intensive margin is captured using hours of work by activity in the last 7 days; an individual not working in a given activity is coded as working 0 hours. The survey also includes data on total child hours spent working in household agriculture.

Information on what grades children were enrolled in prior to the initial closures allows us to identify households affected by the partial reopening. We define ‘treatment’ households as those with children enrolled in grades 4 or 8 prior to the pandemic (eligible for the partial reopening)<sup>6</sup> while ‘control’ households have children in grades 3, 5, 6, 7, or 9, but not in grade 4 or 8.<sup>7</sup> We

> 4. See Appendix D for more detail.

> 5. We use the term labor ‘supply’ to refer to equilibrium outcomes, acknowledging that individuals may have been willing to supply additional labor but faced limited demand.

> 6. Few households report any children in grade 12; we test robustness of our results to including them.

> 7. Results are robust to including households with children in grade 2 as controls and to excluding households with children in grade 9 (in secondary school) or in grade 6 (to focus only on immediately adjacent grades).

6