"The new World Bank report, ‘Collapse and Recovery: How COVID-19 Eroded Human Capital and What to Do About It,’ analyzes global data on the pandemic’s impacts on young people at key developmental stages: early childhood (0-5 years), school age (6-14 years), and youth (15-24 years)," it said. "It found that today’s students could lose up to 10% of their future earnings due to COVID-19-induced education shocks. And the cognitive deficit in today’s toddlers could translate into a 25% decline in earnings when these children are adults."
The pandemic significantly restricted the ability to acquire knowledge and to maintain healthcare, as many education-related, job training and maternal services were disrupted in numerous countries, the report said.
World Bank President David Malpass warned in the report that the COVID-19 pandemic measures, especially school closures, threatened to wipe out decades of progress in building human capital. Malpass pointed out the importance of targeted measures to reverse the losses in foundational learning, health and skills.
"Countries need to chart a new course for greater human capital investments to help citizens become more resilient to the overlapping threats of health shocks, conflict, slow growth and climate change and also lay a solid foundation for faster, more inclusive growth," Malpass said.
The World Bank warned in the report that preschool-age children in different countries have lost about 30% of their learning in early language and literacy as well as in mathematics as compared to pre-pandemic cohorts.
"Among school-age children, on average, for every 30 days of school closures, students lost about 32 days of learning," the report said.
Such a situation happened because of school closures and ineffective remote learning measures. At the same time, nearly 1 billion children in low- and middle-income countries missed out on at least a full year of in-person schooling due to school closures, and more than 700 million missed one and a half years, the report said.
"As a result, learning poverty - already 57% before the pandemic - has increased further in these countries, with an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand a basic written text," the report said.
The international community should take urgent actions to improve the situation, the report said.
In the short term, that means targeted campaigns for vaccinations and nutritional supplementation, increasing access to pre-primary education, and support for adapted training, job intermediation, entrepreneurship programs, and new workforce-oriented initiatives are crucial, the report said.
"In the longer term, countries need to build agile, resilient, and adaptive health, education, and social protection systems that can better prepare for and respond to current and future shocks," the report added.