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.

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.

This book highlights the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health needs of children and adolescents in order to shed light on future practice and reform needed to better deal with the aftermath of such devastating events. The book identifies the conditions during any public health crisis that heighten the mental health needs of children and adolescents and suggests the reforms of mental health services needed to better meet the needs of children and youths during and following pandemics and other public health crises. Importance is placed not only on addressing the effects of COVID-19 but on anticipating and preparing for other public health disruptions to the lives of those who have not reached adulthood. Although mental health services in all settings are considered, special attention is given to the role of schools in providing for the mental health of children and adolescents and preparing for the mental health implications of future public health disruptions. The book will be of equal use to both students and researchers in the fields of mental health, well-being, and education as well as teachers, educational psychologists, social workers, and practitioners working in schools and communities to address students’ mental health needs. It will help readers better understand how and why COVID-19 was a negative influence on students’ mental health, and unpack how best to deal with the aftermath of the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused major disruptions to education around the world. Since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, most students on the planet were affected by the interruption of in-person schooling. To mitigate the educational loss such interruption would cause, education authorities the world over created a variety of alternative mechanisms of education delivery. They did so quickly and with insufficient knowledge about what would work well, for which children, and for what aspects of the schooling experience.Having to create such alternative arrangements in short order was the ultimate adaptive leadership challenge, one for which no playbook existed, one for which solutions would have to be invented, rather than drawn from existing technical knowledge. The nature of the challenge differed across the world and regions, and it differed also within countries as a function of the differential public health and economic impact of the pandemic on communities, and of variations in institutional and financial resources available to redress such impact, including availability of digital infrastructure and previous knowledge and experience of teachers and students with digi-pedagogies and other resources to create alternative education delivery systems.Sustaining educational opportunities amidst these challenges created by the pandemic was an example of adaptive education response not to a unique unexpected challenge but to one in a larger class of problems, just one of the many adaptive conundrums facing communities and societies. Beyond the challenges resulting from the pandemic, other complications of that sort predating the pandemic included those resulting from poverty, inequality, social inclusion, governance, climate change, among others. In some ways, the pandemic served as an accelerant for some of those, augmenting their impact or underscoring the urgency of addressing them. Adaptive puzzles of this sort, including pandemics, are likely to continue to impact education systems in the foreseeable future. This makes it necessary to strengthen the capacity of education systems to respond to them.Reimagining education systems so they are resilient in the face of adaptive challenges is an opportunity to mobilize new talent and institutional resources. Partnerships between school systems and universities can contribute to those reimagined and more resilient systems, they can enhance the institutional capacity of education systems to devise solutions and to implement them. Such partnerships are also an opportunity for universities to be more deliberate in integrating their three core functions of research, teaching and outreach in service of addressing significant social challenges in a context in rapid flux.In this book we present the results of one approach to produce the integration between research, teaching and outreach just described, resulting from engaging graduate students in collaborations with school systems for the purpose of helping identify ways to sustain educational opportunity during the disruption caused by the pandemic. This activity engaged our students in research and analysis, contributing to their education, and it engaged them in service to society. The book examines what happened to educational opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic in Bangladesh, Belize, the municipality of Santa Ana in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kenya, in the States of Sinaloa and Quintana Roo in Mexico, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and in the United States in Richardson Independent School District in Texas. It offers an systematic analysis of policy options to sustain educational opportunity during the pandemic.

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.