To leave no child behind, UNESCO developed the first global report of this scope onboys’ disengagement from education, bringing together qualitative and quantitativeevidence from over 140 countries. This report provides an overview on the globalsituation on boys’ disengagement from and disadvantage in education. It identifiesfactors influencing boys’ participation, progression and learning outcomes ineducation. It also analyses responses by governments and partners, and examinespromising policies and programmes. Finally, it includes recommendations on how tore-engage boys with education and address disadvantage.While girls continue to face severe disadvantages andinequalities in education, the report shows that boys inmany countries are at greater risk than girls of repeatinggrades, failing to complete different education levelsand having poorer learning outcomes in school. Noless than 132 million boys of primary and secondaryschool age are out of school. They urgently requiresupport.As this report shows, supporting boys does notmean that girls lose out and vice versa. Addressingboys’ disengagement not only benefits boys’ learning,employment opportunities, income and well-being, itis also highly beneficial for achieving gender equality anddesirable economic, social and health outcomes.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Achieving Equitable Education argues that critical gaps in education data are hampering the achievement of one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: “inclusive and equitable quality education…for all”. This book critically explores education data gaps across regions, themes and levels of education, highlighting key relationships and disconnects between national, regional and global data needs.

This paper estimates the impact of a large negative childcare shock on gender gaps in entrepreneurship using the shock created by national COVID-19 school closure policies. The paper leverages a unique data set of monthly enterprise data collected from a repeated cross-section of business owners across 50 countries via Facebook throughout 2020 and in 2021. The paper shows that, globally, female-led firms were, on average, 4 percentage points more likely to close their business and experienced larger revenue declines than male-led firms during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (male firms closed at a rate of 17 percent in 2020, and 12 percent in 2021). The gender gap in firm closures persisted into 2021. The closing of schools, a key part of the care infrastructure, led to higher business closures, and women with children were more likely to close their business in response to a school closure policy than men with children. Female entrepreneurs were found to take on a greater share of the increase in the domestic and care work burden than male entrepreneurs. Finally, the paper finds that women entrepreneurs in societies with more conservative norms with respect to gender equality were significantly more likely to close their business and increase the time spent on domestic and care responsibilities in response to a school closure policy, relative to women in more liberal societies. The paper provides global evidence of a motherhood penalty and childcare constraint to help explain gender inequalities in an entrepreneurship context.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching impacts in every part of the world, including on vulnerable populations in rural areas of low- and middle-income countries. This report explores the ways in which men and women in rural areas of four countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)—Kenya, Niger, Rwanda, and Uganda—experienced the COVID-19 pandemic and associated income losses, as well as their responses to the crisis. To identify and monitor the differential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women and men in rural households, IFPRI conducted phone surveys in selected regions of the four focal countries, with financial and technical support from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The surveys traced gender differences in responses to the pandemic and associated restrictions, such as choice of coping strategies, access to public assistance, and changes in the care burden for men and women.

This open access edited volume is a comparative effort to discern the short-term educational impact of the covid-19 pandemic on students, teachers and systems in Brazil, Chile, Finland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. One of the first academic comparative studies of the educational impact of the pandemic, the book explains how the interruption of in person instruction and the variable efficacy of alternative forms of education caused learning loss and disengagement with learning, especially for disadvantaged students. Other direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic diminished the ability of families to support children and youth in their education. For students, as well as for teachers and school staff, these included the economic shocks experienced by families, in some cases leading to food insecurity and in many more causing stress and anxiety and impacting mental health. Opportunity to learn was also diminished by the shocks and trauma experienced by those with a close relative infected by the virus, and by the constrains on learning resulting from students having to learn at home, where the demands of schoolwork had to be negotiated with other family necessities, often sharing limited space. Furthermore, the prolonged stress caused by the uncertainty over the resolution of the pandemic and resulting from the knowledge that anyone could be infected and potentially lose their lives, created a traumatic context for many that undermined the necessary focus and dedication to schoolwork. These individual effects were reinforced by community effects, particularly for students and teachers living in communities where the multifaceted negative impacts resulting from the pandemic were pervasive. This is an open access book.