September to July). However, just before schools were due to re-open in April 2015, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced the continuation of a pre-Ebola policy, that ‘visibly pregnant girls’ would be unable to re-enrol. Given the difficulty of correctly identifying a pregnant girl, school principals gained discretion in exactly how they enforced this ban.<sup>13</sup> Finally, the epidemic had severe consequences for health care provision. As Panel D in Figure A1 shows, health care services pre-crisis were already very low. Ebola impacted the health system in two ways: (i) the human capital of health care workers; (ii) public trust in using health facilities. On the first dimension, health workers were under-equipped and under-prepared for the epidemic. Their inability to rapidly implement infection prevention and control measures left them exposed to infection during routine contact and enabled further transmission to other health workers. Evans _et al._ [2015] document how Ebola deaths were disproportionately concentrated among health personnel. For example, by May 2015, while _._ 06% of the population had died from Ebola, 6 _._ 85% of health care workers had died from Ebola.<sup>14</sup> On the second dimension, health facilities became associated with Ebola as some were transformed into holding centers. Visits to health centres were thought to be among the largest causes of Ebola transmission. Combined with a lack of a cure and huge uncertainty, confidence in the health system was undermined, leading families to keep sick members at home, thus further spreading the virus.

The crisis impacted economic opportunities for all. However, each policy response might have had further unintended consequences on women. For example, they could have been relatively more impacted by this economic disruption because womens’ labor force participation rates are higher than for men up until age 30 (this is confirmed in our pre-intervention census). Young women are especially reliant on self-employment, and were more exposed to agriculture (where 54% of working women are employed).

The schooling policy response had particularly acute impacts on young women. The loss of one year of human capital accumulation is non-trivial given their lower levels of human capital to begin with. For example, women aged over 24 have 1 _._ 8 years of completed schooling in our baseline census, while men have completed 4 years on average. As schools reopened, given the formal ban on pregnant girls, potentially large numbers of adolescent girls might have been unable to re-enrol, irrespective of their actual pregnancy status. This lower level of human capital accumulation worsens lifetime labor market earnings, and such schooling policies might also increase social

> 13In May 2015, it was announced that an alternative ‘bridging’ education system would be established to allow pregnant girls to continue schooling, but in different premises or times to their peers. Other temporary measures, such as community learning centres and home-based approaches, were also implemented. At best, this bridging system varied in effectiveness, and did nothing to help pregnant girls find an alternative way to take national exams.

> 14In absolute terms, this corresponded to 79 doctor, nurse, and midwife deaths. By the end of November there had been a further 179 confirmed Ebola cases among health workers.

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