(music)
- Hello and welcome to a socially-distanced edition
of "Expert Answers".
I'm Paul Blake in Washington, D.C.
and today's episode is all about global education.
Specifically the impact of the ongoing
coronavirus pandemic on global education.
As you may know, around the world, schools
are being shuttered as countries work
to slow the spread of COVID-19.
But it leaves students out of classrooms
and it begs the question, "how do we
educate children during a crisis?"
Well, to get an answer to that and other
key questions about dropout rates,
school meals and distance learning,
I had the chance to speak to the World Bank Group's
Global Director for Education, Jaime Saavedra,
from his home in Lima, Peru.
(music)
Jaime, thank you so much for being here.
I wanna ask, in the short term there's
been a lot of focus on the health impacts.
Can you talk a little bit about how
global education has been impacted?
Give us a sort of global overview.
- Thanks for having me, Paul.
Look, this - we're living a huge crisis.
As of now, as you were saying, more than
80% of children who should - and young people -
who should be in school are not in school.
173 countries have closed most - closed
their institutions. In most, the vast majority,
completely shuttered and we have almost
1.6 billion children who are out of school.
This is a huge crisis.
- You were the Education Minister in Peru.
I'm sure you've seen different big stops
and problems in education.
How would you characterize this moment
for global education?
- So interruptions in the education process,
something happened, there could be a natural
disaster, there could be a strike, so that has happened,
but it has never happened in this magnitude globally
and remember that we were already living
a learning crisis, pre-COVID.
We were saying that in the low- and in
middle-income countries only 53% of children
were able to read and understand
a text by age 10 and in addition to that,
now we have a long interruption in the
schooling process so that crisis will be deepened.
- One of the things we're seeing, I think,
certainly here in the U.S., other
high-income countries, is this relatively
easy transition to online learning.
Have you seen the same in low- and middle-income countries?
Have they been able to make that same transition?
- Now, I would challenge the view that in
richer countries this has been easy.
I don't think it has been easy anywhere.
We go to middle- and lower-income countries
the situation is much, much more complicated.
The fraction of students who will have
a device and will have the bandwidth
and connectivity that is needed is relatively small.
- That must create a huge kind of equity issue
then, right? Between the sort of haves and have-nots
of the internet, become the
haves and have-nots of education.
- Correct, so we knew that there was a digital divide.
Now that digital divide is creating a potentially
extreme impact on inequality of opportunities.
So that's why many countries, what they are thinking,
is a multi-platform approach to remote learning.
We need to be very creative, use all possible means,
but with that idea that we need to reach everyone.
- Jaime, you've written a blog on the World Bank website
and in one, in that one point you raised
is student dropout rates.
Explain the dropout concern here.
- Students, particularly secondary education students,
or students who are attending now tertiary education,
will not come back to the system, will not
come back to the system because, I mean,
this is gonna be a huge economic shock
so families might not have resources
or some will have to resort to work.
Others will - just the fact that they are disconnected
for such a long time and might have been
students who were in the brink of dropping out,
then they will.
- Now, this sudden stop of school is also
having some knock-on effects that we might not
immediately think about.
What happens to the students who depend
on schools for food?
Can you talk a little bit about the sort of
nutritional impact of the school stoppage
and just how big of a concern that is for you?
- The last numbers that I've seen
is about 300 million children who receive
their main meal at school, right?
And that has been suddenly interrupted,
so many countries are trying to find ways
of compensating that, either through
cash transfer programs or trying to make sure
that they can receive those, that food
through different other mechanisms, it could be
even sending it at home.
But that is something that countries should emphasize.
- There's been a lot of concern about recessions
and that sort of thing.
How quickly do you think global education
will recover after the pandemic sort of passes
or the worst of the pandemic globally passes?
- First of all, we're gonna be, there's gonna be
a squeeze in public budgets in general, right?
And we have seen in other crisis that that
might have an impact on
social sector expenditures, including education.
At the same time you will have - the families
will have less resources to invest in education.
Either in tertiary education or in the cases
in which you would have - you still have to pay fees -
there will be a lower disposable income
and education might suffer.
Third, you will have in that same context
in which public budgets are gonna be squeezed,
in many countries you are gonna see
a shift of enrollments from private sector
to the public sector, which is free, right?
Because families will not have resources
to pay for private education in those countries
in which there is a sizable share of private education.
- Jaime, we've, over the past few minutes,
laid out a fairly bleak picture for education
around the world in the wake of the pandemic.
Now, there is some signs of hope.
The World Bank has recently announced this
kind of large-scale financial support package -
up to $160 billion in financial support
for countries fighting the pandemic over 15 months.
Can you talk a little bit about what
the education team is doing to support countries
in the face of the pandemic?
- So at this stage the main support
to countries and the work that all our teams
are really focused on, is on the coping strategies.
A lot working is precisely in that design
and technical assistance related to, and support
related to, the timing and implementing those
remote learning multi-platform strategies
that we were talking before.
Things will start shifting as time passes.
I mean more focus on scholarships, on
demand-side interventions and then support countries
in that recovery phase.
- Jaime Saavedra, thank you so much
for joining us from Lima, Peru.
- Thank you.
- Jaime Saavedra is the Global Director for Education
at the World Bank.
(music)
If you wanna learn more about the World Bank's
response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic
head on over to worldbank.org/coronavirus
and be sure to follow all of our
social media accounts.
In the meantime, stay safe, continue
to socially distance.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Goodbye.
(music)