Pandemic: how to recover the deterioration of human capital? – 02/20/2023 – Pablo Acosta

The pandemic has had devastating effects on children and young people. While the worst of the pandemic is over, its effects still linger. There are solutions, but implementing them is urgent. The World Bank’s new global report “Collapse and Recovery: How the Covid-19 pandemic has eroded human capital and what to do about it” measures the impact of the pandemic on children and young people, and points to solutions for countries like Brazil. The bad news is that the effects are still devastating today. However, there are proven strategies for recovering these losses.

The report emphasizes that early childhood is a critical period for brain development and lays the foundation for skills such as literacy and numeracy. Because of the pandemic, very young children have stopped receiving essential vaccines and stopped attending preschool. Students in this age group in the city of Rio de Janeiro lost, on average, four months of learning in 2020, with the greatest losses experienced by children from disadvantaged families.

In Sobral (CE), preschool students lost six to seven months of learning. In Brazil, in general, the losses were very pronounced. Preschool enrollments declined and remained down by more than 13 percentage points at the end of 2021 compared to what would have occurred in the absence of the pandemic. Furthermore, declines in school enrollment were greatest among children in lower socioeconomic status families.

According to the report, from April 1, 2020 to March 31, 2022, schools in Brazil were fully closed 44% of the time. They were partially or fully closed for 90% of the time in the same period. The closure of schools and the inefficiency of remote teaching resulted in low learning by students while there were no face-to-face classes. On average, worldwide, for every 30 days of school closures, students lose 32 days of learning –despite efforts with distance learning, students did not learn during this period and some even forgot what they had learned, hence the loss period is greater than the closing time.

In addition, school dropouts have increased in some countries. Data from PNAD (Continuous National Household Sample Survey) show that, in Brazil, after the reopening of schools, there was a drop of one percentage point in school-age enrollments. There are around 400,000 children and young people in this age group who have stopped going to school.

Youth is another crucial stage in the life cycle emphasized by the report. Young people are making important decisions, such as continuing to study, work or start a family. Covid-19 has led to a huge drop in employment and a worse transition for young people into the labor market. In most countries, employment in this segment fell sharply at the beginning of the pandemic. These declines were particularly pronounced in Brazil, with a reduction of six percentage points.

Changes in the formal employment rate were small and brief, but the number of hours worked by young employees, a measure of job quality, fell by six hours a week between early 2020 and late 2021.

The number of young people who were neither employed nor enrolled in schools or training courses increased substantially. In the last quarter of 2021, despite the recovery, 22% of young people in Brazil were in this situation. Being unemployed or in a low-paying job when entering the workforce can leave scars – the impact is estimated to last for up to ten years. At the end of 2021, youth employment recovered pre-pandemic levels, but the medium and long-term trend of this indicator remains relatively low, analyzing the progression since 2011.

These losses are a call to action. People who were under 25 at the start of the pandemic will represent 90% of the working age workforce in 2050. In the face of this real collapse of human capital, what can you do? The good news is that there are proven strategies for recovering these losses.

Increasing coverage of preschool education and improving its content are good examples. Both would have short-term benefits, helping children to be better prepared for learning. In the long term, they have been shown to increase higher education attendance and earnings.

For school-age children, simply getting them back to school will not be enough. A child who stopped going to school in second grade and stayed home for a year will not be able to follow the fourth grade curriculum upon returning. It will be important to adapt teaching to the learning level of these students. Increasing class time and catch-up programs – such as make-up classes – can also reverse learning losses.

Young people need help to successfully enter the job market. Youth-friendly training, intermediation and entrepreneurship programs, as well as professional internships, are particularly important.

In all these stages of the life cycle studied by the report, when higher individual incomes, higher tax revenues and a lower need for social assistance are considered, most of the proposed programs end up paying off the investment, even having higher returns than adult-oriented programs.

To better prepare for future shocks, the report emphasizes the need for solutions that bring together health, education and social protection programs in an integrated human development system.

If countries do not act now, the human capital losses documented in this report will become permanent and last for generations to come. The time to act is now.

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