Highlights
During the COVID-19 pandemic:
Sierra Leone reached its target of providing 1 million children with education through remote learning during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.
In Edo State, Nigeria, 56 percent of Primary and Junior Secondary School students with access to the EdoBEST@home program were able to learn away from school.
Turkey’s Digital Education System (EBA) reached 70 percent of the student population through online digital education system and virtual classrooms.
In Peru, the “Aprendo en Casa” program reached 7.2 million students through a combination of radio, TV, and internet.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures and online learning. Countries with robust systems and prior investment, including World Bank support, were better prepared to provide learning continuity. The countries that were best positioned to do so had prior experience (such as Sierra Leone, which reached 1.4 million pupils); had already developed remote learning curricula (such as Turkey, which reached 18 million pupils), had trained teachers in remote learning practices(such as Nigeria’s Edo State, which reached 260,000 students), and/or had appropriate technology in place to reach students and had invested in student engagement (such as Peru, where 4.5 million students logged on each month).
Challenge
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was facing a learning and skills crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic deepened this crisis. School closures have led to huge learning losses with children in Learning Poverty (defined as the proportion of 10-year-old children unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text) rising from 57.1 percent in 2019 to an estimated 70 percent in 2022. Beyond reduced incomes, learning losses can lead to lower productivity, greater inequality, and increased risks of social unrest for decades to come. These trends can be reversed if countries act quickly, decisively, and with adequate resources to recover lost learning, guided by evidence on what works. Learning from these experiences will inform better education systems that are ready to deal with the next crisis.
During the COVID-19 crisis, one billion children missed one year of schooling, and of these children 700 million missed a total of 1.5 years of education. Many countries were ill-prepared for the extensive school closures, but the few with prior experience of remote learning, trained teachers, appropriate technology, and engaged learners provided learning continuity during the crisis.
Middle- and high-income environments mostly deployed online learning systems, allowing for teacher-student interaction and engagement more or less in real time. Low-income and Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) affected environments often lack wide-spread access to electricity, connectivity, and devices that would make sophisticated remote learning possible. Only three of 54 Low-Income and FCV-affected countries have internet penetration rates above 50 percent. Instead, they deployed more basic technology solutions (principally radio and television).
Approach
The World Bank Group now aims to help countries with two related challenges: first, to recover the learning lost during school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic; second, to build the crisis-readiness of education systems so that they are more resilient to shocks in future.
To tackle learning losses, the WBG is using an expanding portfolio, strengthened by the Learning Poverty policy commitments, to prioritize the following approaches:
First, keep schools open and increase instructional time.
Second, assess students and equip teachers to match instruction to students’ levels of learning.
Third, streamline the curriculum and focus on foundational learning so that teachers and students target their efforts more effectively.
Fourth, promote national political commitment for learning recovery, guided by credible measurement of learning. Political leaders must become aware of the seriousness of the learning crisis and make it a top priority by devoting the necessary human, management, and financial resources to learning recovery.
Results
Since early 2020, the World Bank Group has supported 479 million students in formal and informal education across pre-primary, primary, secondary, tertiary, and vocational education. The examples below demonstrate the experiences of a few countries that were able to provide continuity of learning through the largest-ever global school closure.
Sierra Leone – building on prior experience
Sierra Leone provides an example of learning from previous crises to prepare for interruptions in education. The largest-ever recorded Ebola outbreak struck West Africa in 2014, and Sierra Leone shut down schools to prevent spread of the disease. With support from its partners, including quickly re-allocated funds from a Global Partnership for Education grant, the government developed remote learning tools to provide instruction to students during this period. Lessons were pre-recorded, broadcast on radio and TV for three hours every day, and a phone line was opened at the end of each segment to allow children to call in with their questions and receive “live” answers. In addition to core subjects across Grades 1–12, instruction also included other important topics, such as psychosocial and life skills, hygiene and handwashing, and basic information on Ebola.
In 2020 schools closed again due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sierra Leone was already working with the World Bank, OECD, Harvard Global Education Innovation Initiative, and HundrED, a non-profit organization focused on K-12 schooling, in a project called Rising Academy Network. To respond to school closures, the government created a free remote learning program with 20 week-long sessions, using radio scripts and SMS content for parents. The project built on experience from the Ebola outbreak with distance learning, to provide learning continuity for 1.4 million children as well as essential training for 22,000 teachers.
Nigeria – teachers ready and able to deliver content in digital formats
Within four months of the first COVID-19-related school closures, the state of Edo in Nigeria launched Edo-BEST@Home, a public-private partnership between Edo state, the World Bank, and New Globe, a United Kingdom-based organization focused on creating technology-enabled education systems. This initiative provided a fully online remote learning program.
Because access to devices and connectivity varied across Edo state, Edo-BEST@Home focused on delivering content and learning activities through mobile phones. Coaches supported teachers while they were using the Edo-BEST@Home platform and virtual classrooms. Teachers could answer students’ questions through the virtual classrooms, grade students’ homework and provide feedback, and communicate with both students and parents through phone calls, text messages, and WhatsApp. By mid-July 2020, Edo State’s remote learning program reached 930 out of 1,000 primary schools in the state and over 7,000 virtual classrooms were created to deliver remote education.
Turkey – building on an existing digital program
Turkey responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by introducing remote learning in March 2020 through its existing online digital education system (Egitim Bilisim Agi or EBA, launched in 2012) and EBA TV; EBA virtual classrooms followed in April 2020. EBA is available to teachers, students, and parents and includes more than 1,600 courses and 20,000 items of video, audio, documents, infographics, and interactive content for learning designed for 18 million students from preschool to 12th grade, including supporting materials for teachers, tests, and exams.
To support these efforts, the World Bank has been working with the Ministry of National Education in the Safe Schooling and Distance Learning Project, approved in June 2020 with funding of $160 million. 11.8 million students, the equivalent of 70 percent of the student population, are recorded as having benefitted from EBA.
Peru – promoting teacher effectiveness and learning engagement
Peru’s Ministry of Education, supported by the World Bank reacted quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic with “Aprendo en Casa” (“I learn at home”), a comprehensive multimodal strategy to deliver remote learning at scale, in less than two weeks.
Access to devices and connectivity needed for remote learning varied across the country. Authorities used TV, radio, and internet modalities to deliver remote learning solutions, enabling “Aprendo en Casa” to reach 7.2 million students. With its radio learning program, Peru’s government partnered with over 1,100 local radio stations to reach students in remote areas and created content delivered in Spanish and nine Indigenous languages.
Regular teacher-student interaction has been key to ensuring high take-up and engagement. By May 2021, 77 percent of students and parents had received support from teachers at least once in the past week and 89 percent of students and parents were satisfied with the communication.
The Ministry of Education grants an honorable mention to the World Bank for its contribution to the provision of educational resources and the transfer of use of works of authorship for the “Aprendo en Casa” strategy during the years 2020, 2021, and 2022, which allowed guaranteeing the continuity of learning for the boys, girls and adolescents of our country in a context of the COVID-19 pandemic
Magnet Carmen Marquez Ramirez
Peruvian Minister for Education, June 2023
World Bank Group Contribution
As of early 2024, the World Bank Group’s Education Global Practice had channeled $4.2 billion to 37 projects supporting countries in their responses to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes but is not limited to activities focused on remote learning.
The World Bank, together with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), received a grant of $25 million from the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). The portion of the grant allocated to the World Bank was $7.5 million and supported the development of global public goods to minimize learning losses. The interactive pdf “Practical Knowledge Tools to Build Resilient Education Systems” has all the links to external resources produced under the GPE financed grant for continuous and accelerated learning. It was implemented by the World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF.
Partnerships
The World Bank, through the Global Partnership for Education, in collaboration with UNICEF and UNESCO, developed the Continuous and Accelerated Learning program in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It developed and piloted global public goods that could be deployed at scale to enable education systems to continue delivering learning, especially to disadvantaged groups, and to accelerate the recovery of lost learning as schools re-opened. As part of this partnership, the Education Global Practice gathered evidence of what countries were providing their teachers and students during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a survey of education ministries in 143 countries conducted by UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, and OECD.
Looking Ahead
To build the crisis-readiness of education systems to future shocks, the WBG is taking the lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic to inform new interventions in schools, universities, and skills centers. A key element of increasing crisis-readiness is ensuring that the education system itself is functioning well, with sufficient financing, staffing, and governance. In addition, more resources are needed to enable continuity of learning should another shock close schools. Remote Learning During COVID-19: Lessons from Today; Principles for Tomorrow shows that technology is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Teachers need to be trained to teach effectively in person or remotely; a two-way interaction between teachers and pupils multiplies the impact on learning; and a wider variety of partners needs to be drawn in, including parents, private companies, civil society and the academic community. These additional resilience provisions are increasingly embedded in new projects supported by the World Ban
k Group.
For countries that didn’t manage this during the COVID-19 school closures, investment is needed should a shock induce a similar scale of school closures again. “Remote Learning During COVID-19: Lessons from Today; Principles for Tomorrow” sets out how many of the recommendations have been taken up in new World Bank-financed operations.
Source: World Bank