Worldwide, Girls’ Diplomas Are Another COVID-19 Casualty

“At least this will be over by your senior year,” I told my sister last spring, as she cried about COVID-19 shutting down her high school in Florida. Then a junior, she was crushed that her school had to cancel prom and her spring musical, and move classes online.

I had no idea how wrong I was. My sister, like so many other students, has spent most of her senior year in her bedroom, Zooming into classes, dance practice, and virtual homecoming.

Now, as I prepare to watch my sister graduate over Zoom, I find myself thinking of girls worldwide who missed out on far more than she did thanks to the pandemic — especially the many girls who will never see their classrooms again.

Before COVID-19 struck, many countries had made great strides in girls’ access to education. According to a 2020 UNESCO report, girls’ enrollment rates in primary and secondary schools in low‑income countries had almost doubled over the previous 25 years. But with more than 90% of the world’s student population impacted by school closures during the pandemic, we are witnessing the largest disruption of education in history. All children are impacted by this disruption, but girls face distinctive risks. UNESCO estimates that 11 million primary and secondary school girls are at risk of not returning to school post-pandemic. Millions more girls will lose pace with minimum proficiency standards in basic reading, writing, or math.

The digital gender gap is a prime reason girls’ education will be disproportionately impacted. A 2018 study by Girl Effect and the Vodafone Foundation found that boys are 1.5 times more likely to have a mobile device for distance learning than girls. This is in addition to data from the 2020 Mobile Gender Gap Report, which examines mobile ownership and internet use in low- and middle-income countries, and shows that women in general are 20% less likely than men to use mobile internet. A 2020 UNICEF report notes that 20% of girls in East Asia and the Pacific (close to nearly 40 million girls) were not able to access distance learning delivered online or through TV or radio during the pandemic due to lack of devices or policies geared toward these needs.

Girls’ education has also been put at risk by the increased rates of gender-based violence during the pandemic. Child marriages and early pregnancies, common global effects of gender-based violence, make participation in education unlikely, and Save the Children is projecting steep increases in both due to COVID and its economic impacts. It projected an additional 2.5 million girls will be at risk of child marriage over the next five years, and estimated that adolescent pregnancies would rise by up to 1 million in 2020. News reports are already showing COVID-related surges in child marriages and early pregnancy in countries such as Kenya, Nepal, Malawi, and Ethiopia.

Education enables girls to grow not only in knowledge, but also in opportunity. Each year of schooling increases a girl’s future wages by 10% to 20%. The World Bank has estimated that trillions of dollars are lost in lifetime productivity and wages by failing to ensure that girls complete 12 years of education.

UN Women Deputy Executive Director Anita Bhatia has stated that “everything we worked for, that has taken 25 years, could be lost in a year.” Policymakers, therefore, should do all they can to minimize COVID’s devastation on girls’ education. One place to start is by learning from the recommendations of the UNESCO-sponsored Global Education Coalition, which brings together U.N., civil society, academic, and private sector actors to protect the right to education. This coalition is pushing for education systems to be gender-transformative, more equitable, and more resilient based on lessons learned from COVID-19. Policymakers should learn from and engage with this coalition.

“I can’t believe I made it,” my sister recently told me. “I never imagined how difficult this year could be.” COVID made circumstances more difficult than imagined for schoolgirls everywhere. However, while some girls plan to step out into a post-pandemic world with diplomas in hand, others will feel the impacts of COVID-19 for the rest of their lives.