March 25, 2021) and five (between March 26 and June 14, 2021).<sup>13</sup> Therefore, the survey captures distinct periods in terms of implementation of public policies. It starts at a time in which most Kenyan schools were closed and spans the whole reopening phase, such that we are able to observe respondents both during and after lockdown.

In each of the three survey waves analyzed in this study, around 4,000 households, associated with more than 10,000 children, were interviewed. Children are on average 9.1 years old and live mostly in rural areas (60 percent). At baseline (between September and November, 2020), around 7 percent of households reported having at least one child going to bed hungry in the last seven days and 38 percent of those children lived in poor households. Table A0, in the appendix, provides a full list of variables and descriptive statistics.

Throughout this paper, we examine child and household characteristics that potentially impact children’s response to the pandemic and help identify whether the pandemic widened pre-existing inequalities. To capture general welfare, we define a binary poverty proxy ( _poor_ ), based on whether children live in a household in which the predominant floor material is dirt (i.e., either earth/sand or dung), and an indicator of child hunger ( _childhunger_ ), defined, also at the household level, by children going to bed hungry at least once in the last seven days.<sup>14</sup> Moreover, we capture remoteness and general infrastructure by including indicator variables for whether the household is located in an urban or rural area ( _urban_ ), whether it has access to the power grid ( _powergrid_ ) and, in analyses from January 2021 (wave four) onwards, to the internet ( _internet_ ).<sup>15</sup> We also take into account the type of school ( _public_ ), private or public, that each child attends.

Given the influence that household heads (who are often the parents) play in the lives of children, we include variables that capture their gender ( _headfemale_ ) and education level based on an indicator for having a tertiary degree ( _headtertiary_ ).<sup>16</sup> Furthermore, as discussed above, (teenage) girls can be disproportionately affected during school closures and times of crisis. We examine to what extent that is the case during lockdowns in Kenya and include a binary variable for child gender ( _female_ ). In addition, we control for the (logarithm of the) number of children in each household ( _nchild_ ), child age ( _age_ ), age squared ( _agesq_ ), for the week of the interview ( _weekcount_ ), and for a binary variable that indicates whether at least one person in the household reported feeling nervous or anxious due to the outbreak ( _feelanxious_ ), as different attitudes to the pandemic may influence children’s school attendance.

To measure the adoption of remote learning forms, we create an indicator variable ( _remote_ ) for children who, although not attending school in person, have access to education online, via television and/or attend school, according to the survey, “remotely/from home”. While the number of children with access to remote education during the period between September and November 2020 (wave three) is limited, a significantly larger group of children resorted to home or community-based schooling at this time.<sup>17</sup> These “alternative” forms of education ( _alternative_ ) include children being educated by their parents, siblings and other members of their community, as well as self-directed learning. Both variables are

> 13 Although our analysis ends with the fifth wave of the survey, two additional RRPS waves have since been implemented.

> 14 Alternatively, in Tables A1 and A2, in the appendix, we test the robustness of our results using an imputed measure of household poverty based on a wider selection of characteristics as an alternative.

> 15 Information on internet access only becomes available in January 2021 (wave four).

> 16 Our data indicate that the benefits of parent (or head) education are mostly driven by those who have a college degree (or higher). Approximately 14 percent of the households in our sample have at least one member who completed at least college education. In robustness tests (not shown), using an indicator of secondary education (or higher) as a replacement does not yield significant coefficients in most cases.

> 17 In fact, between September and November 2020 (wave three), the adoption of alternative forms of education is almost 20 percentage points higher among those without access to remote learning, suggesting that communitybased and self-directed learning can be seen as the second-best option when schools are closed. Nevertheless, almost 70 percent of children with access to remote learning during this period reported to also make use of alternative forms of learning.

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