COVID-19 and Children’s School Resilience: Evidence from Nigeria

Sylvain Eloi Dessy, Horace Mahugnon Akim Gninafon, Luca Tiberti and Marco Tiberti

No 9736, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper analyzes the impact of COVID-19 lockdown measures on children's school resilience. Using an individual fixed-effect linear probability model on Nigeria data, it exploits the quasi-randomness of these measures to estimate their effect on school attendance after the lockdown was lifted. The results show that COVID-19 lockdown measures reduced children's probability of attending school after the school system reopened. This negative impact increased with children's age, reaching a peak among those whose education was no longer compulsory. For schoolchildren in that age group, the negative effect of COVID-19 lockdown measures is likely to be permanent, which, if not reversed, will undermine the quality of the economy-wide future labor force. The paper also finds evidence that in the child marriage-prone North-West part of Nigeria that these measures increased gender inequality in education among children aged 12 to 18. This result suggests that COVID-19 lockdown measures may exacerbate harmful traditional practices such as child marriage.

Keywords: Educational Sciences; Social Cohesion; Gender and Development; Child Labor Law; Labor Standards; Child Labor; Labor Markets; Rural Labor Markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07-26
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/45820162 ... nce-from-Nigeria.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: COVID-19 and Children’s School Resilience: Evidence from Nigeria (2021)
Working Paper: COVID-19 and Children's School Resilience: Evidence from Nigeria (2021)
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