Education Development Trust response to International Development Committee inquiry “Humanitarian crises monitoring” considering the impact of coronavirus on developing countries around the world and the UK’s response

1. Education Development Trust (EdDevTrust) is a leading education not-for-profit organisation, with over 50 years’ experience of improving educational outcomes internationally. Serving governments and donors, we have worked in over 90 countries to improve the life chances of children and young people through transforming education. Established in 1968, we are proud to employ a rich mix of educationalists and responsive teams of delivery experts to address the challenging needs of clients globally. We deliver programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, South-East Asia and the United Kingdom, and combine our on-the-ground insight with international best practice to improve education systems and transform lives around the world. We are a key supplier of educational services funded by UKAid, with our DFID-funded work equivalent to around £25m annually.

2. EdDevTrust is submitting evidence on “longer term issues, implications and lessons to be learnt” in relation to four of the areas identified in the scope of the inquiry, namely:

• The direct and indirect impacts of the outbreak on developing countries, and specific risks and threats (particularly relating to countries with existing humanitarian crises and/or substantial populations of refugees or internally displaced persons);
• The UK’s response, bilaterally and with the international community, to the spread of coronavirus to developing countries;
• Lessons identified, learned and applied from previous experience with infectious diseases (for example, Ebola) and their implications for DFID’s policy on a global heath strategy;
• The impact of the outbreak on UK aid funding in the longer term.

3. Summary of key messages and recommendations for the UK Government

3.1  Key message: Education must form a core part of global responses to Covid-19 to mitigate long-term negative economic, social and public health impacts.

The UK Government and DFID should:

• Make tough spending choices with limited resources informed by both short-term and longer-term benefits.
• Remember that investing in education and learning today is critical to equip the next generation of doctors, nurses, researchers and mathematical modellers with the skills and competencies they will need in future crises and pandemics.

3.2  #1: While the use of ed-tech is a very important factor in ensuring education continuity, it is not a panacea: low-tech and no-tech responses will be critical to maintaining education provision in some contexts and ensuring the learning crisis is not worsened.

DFID should:

• Offer guidance on which high-, low- and no-tech solutions are available and where they might be appropriate.
• Ensure a strong policy emphasis on teacher involvement in student learning – and how teachers can be supported.
• Put in place tracking systems to understand the impact of high-, low- and no-tech solutions on the most marginalised.

3.3 #2: The aid sector will need to consider how to maximise impact within the constraints of shrinking budgets, mobilising the existing workforce across sectors on innovative projects and approaches.

DFID should:

• Explore opportunities at country level for more cross-sectoral working.
• Explore and offer guidance on how country offices can better mobilise health system delivery models.
• Make the strengthening of existing education workforce roles a policy priority, with an emphasis on new types of technical assistance, which provide value-for-money by strengthening the impact of different roles on teaching and learning.
• Look for opportunities to help digitally unconnected households to support their children with learning, whether through pre-loaded smartphones, educational radio programmes, or distribution of paper-based learning materials.
• Work with private-sector digital companies and radio stations to see if data bundles or airtime can be provided free or purchased at low cost to support access to online learning.

3.4 #3: Consider the longer-term impact school closures will have on Sub-Saharan Africa and how education systems will need to respond.

The UK Government and DFID should:

• Ensure teachers and other school staff continue to receive pay during school closures, to help provide them with economic stability and avoid them having to find other work and potentially leaving the profession.
• Offer guidance on planning for schools re-opening, to support countries with issues such as school risk assessments, phased returns, curriculum coverage and workforce deployment challenges.
• Offer guidance on appropriate psychosocial support, public information campaigns, and student retention schemes to mitigate secondary impacts of school closures on students’ futures.
• Offer guidance on catch-up and accelerated learning solutions to mitigate long-term impacts of school closures.
• Improve the connection between education and careers/employability programming, so that young people have the necessary skills and knowledge to navigate new economic uncertainties.
• Work with governments to ensure cross-ministry coordination to leverage cross-sectoral efficiencies, especially in providing conditional cash transfers to encourage families to keep vulnerable children – especially girls – in education.
• Provide a consistent, cohesive message from Whitehall, the Cabinet Office and DFID senior officers at country level, that all UKAid-funded programmes should now be pivoting to include Covid-19 as a risk and be taking a Covid-19-sensitive approach.

4. Key message: Education must form a core part of global responses to Covid-19 to mitigate long-term negative economic, social and public health impacts.

4.1  Areas of the inquiry:

• The UK’s response, bilaterally and with the international community, to the spread of coronavirus to developing countries;
• The impact of the outbreak on UK aid funding in the longer term.

      4.2 Missed schooling is likely to result in profound economic impacts. Drawing on extensive previous research, World Bank education economists have estimated the impact of missed schooling due to Covid-19 on future earnings. They conclude that every four months of lost schooling results in a 2.5% loss in future earnings over a student’s working life. Applied to the US school-age population, the future nationwide earnings loss would total US$2.5 trillion, or 12.7% of annual GDP. Extrapolating these figures internationally (on the assumption that the US economy represents about a quarter of global output), the global economy could lose around US$10 trillion as a result of four months of school closures.[1] If schools are closed for longer and effective means of supporting remote learning are not put in place, such losses could be substantially higher.

.3 This underlines the need for education to be considered as part of both immediate and longer-term responses to Covid-19. Over the last 15 years, the education in emergencies community has successfully advocated for education to be considered a core part of humanitarian crisis response and funding, as opposed to being considered only in post-crisis moves to longer-term development. This resulted in the creation of the Education Cluster to uphold education as a basic human right and a core component of humanitarian responses, and an increase in the percentage of the humanitarian budget spent on education. This approach must now be taken in the response to Covid-19.

4.4               School closures are impacting over 90% of the world’s children and young people.[2] In a previous epidemic – the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa – the Global Business Coalition for Education outlined three important crisis responses for the education sector:

1. Emergency provision whilst schools are closed;
2. Safe reopening of schools;
3. Sustaining safe schools and healthy communities where learning can take place.

These responses are applicable to any public health crisis and highlight the need for the education sector to be involved in both emergency provision and post-crisis recovery.

4.5 The UK Government and DFID should therefore:

• Make tough spending choices with limited resources informed by both short-term and longer-term benefits.
• Remember that investing in education and learning today is critical, to equip the next generation of doctors, nurses, researchers and mathematical modellers with the skills and competencies they will need in future crises and pandemics.

Below, we outline three important considerations for DFID in looking at Covid-19 support to the education sector.

5.               #1: While the use of ed-tech is a very important factor in ensuring education continuity, it is not a panacea: low-tech and no-tech responses will be critical to maintaining education provision in some contexts to ensure the learning crisis is not worsened.

5.1 Area of the inquiry:

• The direct and indirect impacts of the outbreak on developing countries, and specific risks and threats (particularly relating to countries with existing humanitarian crises and/or substantial populations of refugees or internally displaced persons).

5.2 Digital learning, while significant, is being adopted far more by schools and governments in high-income countries – where a greater proportion of the population has access to computers, tablets, smartphones and connectivity – than those in low- and middle-income countries. While nearly 70% of countries worldwide have introduced a national distance learning platform, only 30% of low-income countries have done so.[3]

5.3 The Young Lives study of childhood poverty, following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, Peru, Vietnam, and the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, demonstrates how internet access is not evenly distributed, with large disparities between rich and poor households, between urban and rural households, and in India, between girls and boys.[4] Such inequalities mean that digital learning is not always possible: disadvantaged students are unlikely to have access to high-tech solutions.[5] The experiences of some of the adolescent girls that EdDevTrust is supporting in Kenya illustrate this challenge. Sharon, a Grade 8 student in an informal settlement in Nairobi, stated:

“Staying and learning at home is not easy. I’m very worried because I’m in Grade 8 and we are supposed to prepare for exams. For me, I can only learn better when I’m in school. I also cannot learn through the internet because we are not connected. My father was a lorry driver, but he has not been going to work for some time now. It is very difficult for him to buy books and sometimes even food.”

5.4              Such unequal access to technological solutions is likely to disproportionately impact learning outcomes for disadvantaged groups, if low-tech or no-tech approaches are not also considered. The EdTech Hub has warned against transitioning the most marginalised students to digital learning over the next six-to-twelve months, stating that is unlikely to lead to scalable outcomes.[6]

5.5              Consideration needs to be given to the different ways that learning can happen remotely and innovatively, not only through digital learning, but also through educational television, interactive radio instruction, and the provision of physical learning materials.

5.6              For example, in EdDevTrust’s Building Learning Foundations programme, we have worked with the Government of Rwanda to ensure education can continue for over 2.6 million learners during school closures, through radio broadcasts.

5.7 A recent evidence review of best practice in pedagogy for remote teaching, undertaken by EdDevTrust on behalf of the EdTech Hub, found that for learners to thrive when studying remotely, it is important to develop and maintain ‘teaching presence’, even where centralised provisions, such as broadcasts, are in place.[7] Indeed, centralised education provision supported by the ‘presence’ of local teachers may be a very powerful combination in ensuring engagement with remote learning. Such ‘presence’ can and should be facilitated through technological solutions (which can sometimes be associated with primarily student-led approaches), although it is also possible to establish teacher presence without online learning. Similarly, the Education Endowment Foundation’s evidence review on supporting students to learn remotely highlighted how teaching quality is more important than how lessons are delivered.[8] We are helping to facilitate such ‘teacher presence’ in our programmes – for example, in schools in Mombasa, Kenya, we are using WhatsApp to facilitate continued learning, with high levels of teacher involvement and interactions with parents.

5.8    To help ensure educational continuity, DFID should:

• Offer guidance on which high-, low- and no-tech solutions are available and where they might be appropriate.
• Ensure a strong policy emphasis on teacher involvement in student learning – and how teachers can be supported.
• Put in place tracking systems to understand the impact of high-, low- and no-tech solutions on the most marginalised.

6. #2: The aid sector will need to consider how to maximise impact within the constraints of shrinking budgets, mobilising the existing workforce across sectors on innovative projects and approaches.

6.1  Area of the inquiry:

• Lessons identified and learned/applied from previous experience with infectious diseases (for example, Ebola) and the implications for DFID’s policy on a global heath strategy.

6.2  The aid sector can draw on examples of promising practices in cross-sectoral working, both in the rapid innovations and adaptations of governments and organisations in the face of Covid-19, and in lessons from past epidemics, such as the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

6.3               In the education response to Ebola, there were strong examples of how the sector embraced working in a more multi-disciplinary way. In Sierra Leone, for example, around 7,000 teachers were redeployed to disease control and social mobilisation activities, while in Liberia, around 18% of teachers were involved in social mobilisation and health awareness workshops within their communities.[9] In the DRC, UNICEF trained a small number of women, including teachers, as psycho-social assistants.[10] Schools were also given additional responsibilities to help raise both teacher and student awareness of disease-related learning, the importance of good hand-washing, and other measures to mitigate the transmission of the disease in and beyond schools.[11] In Sierra Leone, some school sites were turned into community-based care centres, although this was met with resentment amongst teachers and pupils.[12]

6.4               With smaller overall aid budgets, it will be important to think creatively about how integrated services and more cohesive working across governments and donors can result in a more coordinated and value-for-money response. The health, education and social welfare sectors have traditionally worked in silos, as have their respective technical advisors within donor agencies. The DFID Nigeria office stands out as a counterexample of working together on more integrated programming. The Covid-19 response represents a critical juncture to disrupt traditional ways of working, to think more innovatively, and to mainstream the practices of the DFID Nigeria office.

6.5               As argued in a recent evidence review on efforts to mitigate the negative educational impact of past disease outbreaks, undertaken by EdDevTrust for DFID,[13] it is important that cross-sectoral working does not only redeploy education staff and resources to support healthcare (as in the rapid onset of the Ebola crisis), but also mobilises health resources and personnel to support learning continuity. EdDevTrust’s current work in Kenya demonstrates a good example of this working in practice.

      6.6 Under the constraints of increasingly limited aid budgets, it is also important to consider how DFID could work in new ways to leverage existing country education resources. Most education systems allocate significant budgets for the wider education workforce (such as district officials), but the latest research from the Education Commission’s Education Workforce Initiative, which EdDevTrust supported, finds that this wider workforce is underutilised. It calls for policymakers to pay much more attention to the impact that a stronger wider workforce would have on learning outcomes.[14] There is potential here for DFID to offer high value-for-money technical assistance to improve the effectiveness of these wider roles and leverage them for increased impact.

6.7  DFID should:

• Explore opportunities at country level for more cross-sectoral working.
• Explore and offer guidance on how country offices can better mobilise health system delivery models.
• Make the strengthening of existing education workforce roles a policy priority, with an emphasis on new types of technical assistance which provide value-for-money by strengthening the impact of different roles on teaching and learning.
• Look for opportunities to help digitally unconnected households to support their children with learning, whether through pre-loaded smartphones, educational radio programmes, or distribution of paper-based learning materials.
• Work with private-sector digital companies and radio stations to make data bundles or airtime available for free or to be purchased at low cost to support access to online learning.

7. #3: Consider the longer-term impact school closures will have on Sub-Saharan Africa and how education systems will need to respond.

7.1 Area of the inquiry:

• The direct and indirect impacts of the outbreak on developing countries, and specific risks and threats (particularly relating to countries with existing humanitarian crises and/or substantial populations of refugees or internally displaced persons).

7.2 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that as a result of Covid-19, growth in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2020 will be -1.6%, the lowest level on record. Lockdown and social distancing severely threaten the livelihoods of vulnerable people with limited social safety nets available. This is further compounded in East Africa, where the locust invasion is devastating crops. As a result, both the IMF and the OECD have called for international solidarity on external financing on grant and concessional terms.[15]

7.3 As the international Covid-19 response moves from immediate health system responses and disease containment, to mitigating secondary effects[16] and potential further waves of infection, it is vitally important that education is considered as an integrated part of the response. This has not been the case in previous epidemics: evidence from UNICEF showed that only 11% of UNICEF’s budget for the Ebola crisis was spent on education, compared to 35% for health and 17% for water, sanitation and hygiene.[17]

7.4              In addition to the general impact of Covid-19 on children (including ill health, economic hardship and malnutrition),[18] we must also consider the longer-term impact of school closures on the future learning and employability prospects of young people. This includes:

• Young people missing out on learning and potentially dropping out of school, especially if school closures are sustained for a long time. This is likely to affect their future employment prospects.
• Risks to child mental health and well-being due to school closures, social distancing and restrictions on movement.
• Potentially long-lasting effects on learning and employability due to neurological impairment from malnutrition or exposure to extreme stress.
• An increase in teenage pregnancies during school closures.[19]
• Higher risks of child marriage, child labour and lower lifetime earnings.

7.5 To mitigate these secondary impacts of school closures, there should be consideration of appropriate psychosocial support measures and informative campaigns to help students manage their mental, physical and sexual health. It may also be helpful to continue conditional cash transfers to encourage families to keep children – especially girls – in education, preventing early marriage and school dropouts.[20]

7.6 UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report argues that the world should have been more prepared for a global pandemic, given that one typically occurs every 10 to 50 years. Following the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the World Health Organization reported that closing schools “can reduce the demand for healthcare by an estimated 30-50% at the peak of the pandemic”.[21] This highlights the need for education sector planners to prepare for interruptions to education as a result of pandemics, rather than to respond, albeit admirably, only at the onset of a major outbreak.[22]

7.7 There are likely to be future waves of increased infection of Covid-19: this requires governments to build resilience and flexibility into the education sector, to enable it to support potential cycles of schools opening and closing. Doing so will enable education systems to adapt and flex to provide some learning continuity and help mitigate the secondary impacts of the pandemic, even if schools are closed for substantial periods.

7.8 The UK Government and DFID should:

• Ensure teachers and other staff in schools continue to receive pay during school closures, to help provide them with economic stability and avoid them having to find other work and potentially leave the profession.
• Offer guidance on planning for schools re-opening, to support countries with issues such as school risk assessments, phased returns, curriculum coverage and workforce deployment challenges.
• Offer guidance on appropriate psychosocial support, public information campaigns, and student retention schemes to mitigate secondary impacts of school closures on students’ futures.
• Offer guidance on catch-up and accelerated learning solutions to mitigate long-term impacts of school closures.
• Improve the connection between education and careers/employability programming, so that young people have the necessary skills and knowledge to navigate new economic uncertainties.
• Work with governments to ensure cross-ministry coordination to leverage cross-sectoral efficiencies, especially in providing conditional cash transfers to encourage families to keep vulnerable children – especially girls – in education.
• Provide a consistent and cohesive message from Whitehall, the Cabinet Office and DFID senior officers at country level, that all UKAid-funded programmes should now be pivoting to include Covid-19 as a risk and should be taking a Covid-19-sensitive approach.

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