As children across Africa return to school this week, they might find a very different landscape to the one they left behind before the pandemic. Classroom sizes in some schools will be smaller due to high dropout rates, especially among adolescent girls. COVID-19 has shut an entire generation in Africa out of the education system. Millions of children in low- and middle-income African countries will not return to schools as they reopen due to a variety of reasons. That includes...
Dr. Charles Murigande is a former Rwandan minister of education and until his retirement in June 2020, he was the deputy vice-chancellor in charge of institutional development at the University of Rwanda. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a lesson for Africa’s education sector: The continent must assume greater responsibility to address an unprecedented learning crisis. Africa must better address a crisis that threatens the vision of a knowledge-based society able to survive in a global and competitive environment.  Exacerbating learning poverty  Since the...
The first case of COVID-19 in Kenya was announced in February 2020. After that, an announcement was made on 15 March 2020 that all learning institutions were to be closed to contain the spread of the virus. Physical learning resumed on 4 January 2021. As a result, the school calendar was considered lost, affecting over 18 million students across the country. In Kenya, many aspects of society and the education sector have been dramatically affected. Before the pandemic, Africa had...
Think back to when you were 10. Imagine if you had not been able to read and understand a simple story at that age. Where do you think you would be today? Age 10 is the age at which children should be switching from learning to read to reading to learn. This critical milestone sets children up for a lifetime of learning. It increases their ability to earn, innovate, improve their own opportunities, and contribute to their societies, including becoming...
Facts from our Africa COVID-19 Tracker Total population: 44,269,594 Percentage of population living in extreme poverty: 41.5% Food inflation: -1.2% (latest: 30 January 2021) People with insufficient food intake: 34.1% (latest: 25 Feb 2021) Children (under 5) with chronic malnutrition: 28.9% Economy Uganda is a low-income country with a fast-growing population. 68% of the population work in the agriculture sector, 7% in industry, and 20% in services. Like many African nations, the future of the Ugandan economy is dependent on the...
Ashlegh Pfunye and Iyunoluwa Ademola-Popoola are Youth Leaders for Global Partnership for Education. They raise awareness of the barriers to education and aim to increase the ambition of leaders for financing education and development. It is undeniable that COVID-19 has altered how we live and work. Lives continue to be lost, and hospitals and health workers have been overwhelmed with patients suffering from the virus. Though efforts such as social distancing, wearing of masks, and bans on large gatherings have...
Maryjacob Okwuosa, Mukhtar H. Modibbo are Youth Leaders for Global Partnership for Education. They raise awareness of the barriers to education and aim to increase the ambition of leaders for financing education and development.  The impact of COVID in Nigeria  The advent of the COVID pandemic has not only revealed the poor state of infrastructure and facilities in the health sector of Nigeria but also revealed the reality of the dilapidation and poor funding of the education sector. Aside from the...
Carine Umutoniwase is a Kenya ONE Champion and the founder of Footprints for Change. COVID-19 has crippled education systems worldwide, leading to the closure of schools for months in countries like Kenya. This saw millions of children out of school, confined to their homes. E-learning was instituted as a response to the learning loss that resulted from schools closing — but this increased inequality among learners, especially for those in underserved and marginalized communities that have limited supply to electricity...
The COVID-19 pandemic is threatening to undo years of progress on global education. Since the pandemic started, school closures have affected up to 91% of enrolled learners, or 1.6 billion children. Here is a look at how countries’ policies on school closures evolved over the past six months. COVID-19 quickly transformed from a localized epidemic to a global pandemic with far-reaching consequences across sectors 6 months ago, when COVID-19 was still just a localized epidemic, only two countries had restrictions on...