This shock will worsen a pre-existing “learning crisis” in which many students in school were learning very little. The World Bank estimates that the percentage of children who are unable to read a simple sentence by age 10 could rise from 53% before the pandemic to 63% as a result of school closures.

These learning losses could stem from a combination of things: forgetting what was previously known, and missing what would have been learned if schools hadn’t been closed. These learning losses can accumulate in the long run. Students who re-enter school far behind the curriculum expectations might be too far behind to learn anything from daily instruction and fall even further behind.

In a new paper, we looked at how much learning loss might be experienced in Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania and Uganda as a result of school closures in the pandemic. We used data from early grade reading assessments in these countries. Our model suggests there could be up to a year’s worth of learning loss in the short run. Our estimates suggest learning losses will be distributed unequally, with students who started at lower learning levels falling the farthest behind.

We estimate that these short-term learning deficits could accumulate to 2.8 years of lost learning in the long run. This is if the curriculum – often overambitious and not aligned to students’ learning levels – is not adjusted to allow students to catch up.

Opportunity for reform

But that doesn’t have to be the outcome.

While COVID-19 has held back learning, bold reform is possible and the pandemic presents a historic opportunity to revamp education systems. It could be a time to institute practices and policies that have been needed to address the underlying learning crisis for decades.

Our review of the literature identified two strategies which could help to mitigate learning losses and improve learning even beyond pre-COVID-19 levels. This review builds on a growing evidence base of interventions that have worked at scale in low- and middle-income countries to improve basic numeracy and literacy skills.