The increase in gender-based violence (GBV)<sup>14</sup> due to COVID-19 has been widely recognized (Peterman et al., 2020). Gender-based violence in the forms of FGM/E, child marriage, and physical or intimate partner violence is pervasive in Chad (Table A.2 in the Appendix). In a study of GBV and its impact on women’s resilience, Le Masson et al. (2019) reports that women in Chad highly reported GBV in the form of denial of resources and forbidding women from earning. The increase or likely increase in GBV in Chad during COVID-19 has direct and indirect long-term impacts on women’s ability to participate in labor markets and generate income. GBV limits survivors’ physical and/or mental ability to maintain their domestic and productive activities. During economic stresses, there is also a tendency among Chadian men to adopt the “flight” phenomenon of abandoning family (observed post-disaster in other parts of the world as well), which gives rise to households headed by females with their single or no income and who find it difficult to access their (ex-) husband’s resources (Le Masson et al. 2019).

Although we could not find any GBV survey results conducted during COVID-19 for Chad, UNFPA reports through studies in Mali and Cameroon that there has been increased accounts of GBV in West and Central Africa, the main ones being in the forms of domestic violence and sex for survival. Additional girls will be subjected to FGM/E as some of the most effective prevention mechanisms which require community or group gatherings are disrupted due to COVID-19 (UNFPA 2020).

The pandemic can interrupt adolescent girls at a critical juncture in their life trajectory by affecting their education and health, which will have economic impacts in their adulthood. Although gender gaps in school attendance have reduced over the years in Chad, girls’ school attendance remains lower than boys’ (Ngatia et al., 2021). There is an increased risk of girls dropping out of school during the pandemic and never returning, which would exacerbate this gap. Evidence from past pandemics such as the 2014 Ebola Crisis in Sierra Leone reveals long-lasting impacts on girls’ school enrollment, increase in child marriage when girls drop out of school due to school closures, and their adoption of risky behaviors, which leads to early childbearing (Bandiera et al. 2018). Child marriage also increases as households marry off their daughters for dowry during economic stress, as evidenced in Chad (Le Masson et al. 2019).

Chad has notable gender gaps in learning outcomes (Ngatia et al. 2021), and hence women in the workforce are less educated and less skilled. Results from HFPS reveal only 15 percent of households with a child in school before COVID-19 school closures were involved in learning activities at home after closure. With school closures and learning at home, the gender gap in learning outcomes could widen because young girls spend more time helping with increased household chores and gender gaps in access to information and technology required for home-based learning.

# 4. Conclusion

In this paper, we used CGE model-based simulations to assess the gender dimensions of the impact of COVID-19 on economic outcomes, i.e., labor force participation, employment, wages, and earnings. We also leveraged the COVID-19 high-frequency phone survey (HFPS) to assess the actual impact of COVID19 on female-headed households, which comprise 23 percent of Chad’s households. To sum up, the COVID-19 pandemic will have a disproportionately higher negative impact on women in urban areas. The CGE simulation results suggest that more women than men working in paid jobs might lose their jobs. The

> 14Gender-Based Violence (GBV), sometimes also referred to as Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) is any harmful act of sexual, physical, psychological, mental, and emotional abuse that is perpetrated against a person's will and that is based on socially ascribed (i.e. gender) differences between males and females.

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