The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdowns to limit its spread have caused the largest mass disruption to education in history and worsened the global learning crisis.

In April 2020, more than 190 countries closed their schools nationally, leaving the education of up to 1.6-billion students at risk, aggravating the pre-existing global education crisis and impacting on education in unprecedented ways.

A joint United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) report shows that, despite progress in providing access to education in recent decades, a global learning crisis persists and hundreds of millions of children are still being left behind.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic started, one in five school-age children in the primary to upper secondary range was out of school, the report, titled ‘How many children and young people have Internet access at home?’, notes.

In addition, about 617-million children and adolescents worldwide, many of whom are in school, cannot read or perform basic mathematics.

The World Bank notes that the average learning poverty rate in low- and middle-income countries is 53%, with over half of all ten-year-old children unable to read and understand a simple text.

Further, according to World Bank estimates, the global school closures in 2020 could result in a loss of $10-trillion in lifetime earnings for this generation of children, exacerbating the state of education.

A Unicef report, ‘Covid-19 and School Closures. One Year of Education Disruption’, shows that, in the period between March 11, 2020, and February 2, 2021, schools were completely closed for an average of 95 instruction days globally, which represents about half the time intended for classroom instruction.

Around 214-million children globally, or one in seven, have missed more than three-quarters of their in-person learning since March 2020 and, of these, 168-million in 14 countries missed almost all classroom instruction time for a year, owing to Covid-19 lockdowns.

At the peak of school closures in April 2020, 94% of students, or 1.6-billion children, were out of school worldwide and about 700-million students currently are studying from home, as societies navigate options of hybrid and remote learning or no schooling at all.

While 53% of countries have fully opened schools and almost a quarter of countries have partially opened schools, 196-million students in 27 countries, or 13%, are impacted on by schools that are still closed as at February 2 this year.

Despite governments and educational institutions developing systems at the onset of the crisis to deliver education remotely, mostly through radio, television or the Internet, there is evidence of learning losses and increases in inequality.

Unicef points out that the lack of connectivity among the most marginalised populations, such as children and youth from poor households and rural areas, places them at an extreme disadvantage and “all but eliminates” any chance they might have of participating in the modern economy.

Globally, 2.2-billion children and youth aged 25 or younger, of whom 1.3-billion are school-age girls and boys aged between 3 and 17 years old and nearly 760-million are youth aged 15 to 24 years, do not have an Internet connection at home.

Further, there is marked inequality in Internet connectivity across the world’s regions, with about 768-million of the children who lack Internet access living in South Asia.

In East Asia and the Pacific, West and Central Africa and Eastern and Southern Africa, more than 300-million children and young people in each region – a total of 900-million – lack home Internet access.

Further, only 6% of youth in low-income countries have Internet access at home, compared with 87% in high-income countries.

A large difference is also seen globally in levels of home Internet access between children and young people who live in rural areas, at 25%, and their urban peers, at 41%.

“With education systems investing in hybrid and remote learning, owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is increasingly clear that this lack of connectivity is a barrier that will prevent children and young people from accessing effective and interactive forms of learning going forward,” the Unicef report points out.

Unicef has been working to reach every child and adolescent worldwide with digital learning technologies, joining forces with the ITU to launch Giga, an ambitious global initiative to connect every school to the Internet.

Giga, which has mapped over 800 000 schools in 30 countries, works with governments, industry and civil and private-sector partners to develop compelling investment cases for blended public–private funding to build the connectivity infrastructure needed to deploy digital learning solutions and other services.

The initiative is now collaborating under the Reimagine Education initiative in coordination with Generation Unlimited.

“Significantly expanding Internet access in homes, communities and schools is vital to ensure that this and subsequent generations of children and young people can acquire the knowledge and skills they need to support a sustainable future,” Unicef concludes.