This evaluation encompasses two related investigations. The first is a randomized controlled trial evaluating the impacts of school meals and literacy programs that will launch when Mozambican primary schools reopen from COVID-19 closures; the evaluation will measure the effects of the interventions on early-grade student outcomes, including nutrition, reading, and school attainment. The second analyzes the effects of school closures due to COVID-19 on schooling attainment, well-being, and mental health among young adolescents in the same schools, particularly adolescent girls.

Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an enormous shock to mortality, economies, and daily life. But what has received insufficient attention is the impact of the pandemic on the accumulation of human capital—the health, education, and skills—of young people. How large was the setback, and how far are we still from a recovery? Collapse and Recovery estimates the impacts of the pandemic on the human capital of young children, school-age children, and youth and discusses the urgent actions needed to reverse the damage. It shows that there was a collapse of human capital and that, unless that collapse is remedied, it is a time bomb for countries. Specifically, the report documents alarming declines in cognitive and social-emotional development among young children, which could translate into a 25 percent reduction in their earnings as adults. It finds that 1 billion children in low- and middle-income countries missed at least one year of in-person schooling. And despite enormous efforts in remote learning, children did not learn during the unprecedentedly long school closures, which could reduce future lifetime earnings around the world by US$21 trillion. The report quantifies the dramatic drops in employment and skills among youth that resulted from the pandemic as well as the substantial increase in the number of youth neither employed nor enrolled in education or training. In all of these age groups, the impacts of the pandemic were consistently worse for children from poorer backgrounds. These losses call for immediate action. The good news is that evidence-based policies can recover these losses. Collapse and Recovery reviews governments’ responses to the pandemic, assessing why there was a collapse in human capital accumulation, what was missing in the policy architecture to protect human capital during the crisis, and how governments can better prepare to withstand future shocks. It offers concrete policy recommendations to recover losses in human capital—programs that will end up paying for themselves in the long term. To better prepare for future shocks such as climate change and wars, the report emphasizes the need for solutions that bring health, education, and social protection programs together in an integrated human development system. If countries fail to act, the losses in human capital documented in this report will become permanent and last for multiple generations. The time to act is now.

References pp. 83-85.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, entailing widespread school closures as well as acute disruptions to household livelihoods, has presumably had substantial consequences for adolescent well-being in developing country contexts that remain largely unexplored. We present novel evidence about the prevalence of mental health challenges among adolescent students as well as educators in rural Mozambique using data from an in-person survey conducted in 175 schools. In our sample, 31% of students report low levels of well-being (though only 10% suffer from high anxiety): students enrolled in schools that used a wider variety of distance learning measures report lower anxiety, while students reporting familial shocks linked to the pandemic report higher anxiety and lower well-being. Educators experience comparatively lower levels of anxiety and higher well-being, and household-level shocks are most predictive of variation in mental health. However, well-being is negatively affected by the range of hygiene-related measures implemented in schools upon reopening.

If school closures and social-distancing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic impeded children's skill development, they may leave a lasting legacy in human capital. To understand the pandemic's effects on school children, this paper combines a review of the emerging international literature with new evidence from German longitudinal time-use surveys. Based on the conceptual framework of an education production function, we cover evidence on child, parent, and school inputs and students' cognitive and socio-emotional development. The German panel evidence shows that children's learning time decreased severely during the first school closures, particularly for low-achieving students, and increased only slightly one year later. In a value-added model, learning time increases with daily online class instruction, but not with other school activities. The review shows substantial losses in cognitive skills on achievement tests, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Socio-emotional wellbeing also declined in the short run. Structural models and reduced-form projections suggest that unless remediated, the school closures will persistently reduce skill development, lifetime income, and economic growth and increase inequality.

This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence on the long-term causal effect of increases in human capital on participation in agriculture. We use variation in male educational attainment generated by Indonesia’s Sekolah Dasar INPRES program, one of the largest ever school building programs. Consistent with the first evaluation [Duflo, 2001], we find that males exposed to a higher program intensity have improved measures of human capital as adults. We then show that treated cohorts are more likely to be employed outside of agriculture–particularly in industry–and less likely to be agricultural workers. Then, exploiting variation in exposure across adjacent districts, we demonstrate that higher INPRES intensity in neighboring districts decreases non-agricultural employment and earnings, consistent with cross-district spillovers mediating the total impacts. Together, the results suggest that government investment in human capital can have profound effects on the rural economy and may help to accelerate shifts away from agriculture.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.