ISLAMABAD: While the real impact of the pandemic on various sectors has yet to be ascertained, one of the major impacts is the highest expected dropout rates of children from school in Pakistan due to fears of coronavirus.
Key findings of a new World Bank report released on Wednesday estimates that 930,000 additional children are expected to drop out from both primary and secondary education. 22 million children are already out of school, and this represents an increase of almost 4.2 per cent of Pakistan’s student population.
“Pakistan is globally the country where we expect the highest dropouts due to the Covid-19 crisis in relative terms,” says the report, titled ‘Learning Losses in Pakistan due to Covid-19 School Closures’, which was released on Wednesday.
The estimate is based on the observed income elasticity of education for various socio-economic quintiles and is based on the June 2020 growth estimates for Pakistan which were estimated to be negative 4.4 per cent.
The report says the loss of 930,000 children from the school system translates into an increase of 1.3 percentage points in the share of children out of school – given that there are 65 million school-age children in the country. This means that the share of children out of school will go up from 27.3 per cent to 28.6 per cent.
The report says that learning poverty will go up to 79 per cent, whereas the level of learning poor in Pakistan was already high at 75 per cent, based on official government data.
The share of children, who do not learn to read by age 10, even if they are in school, is expected to increase to 50 per cent. This results from a shock to the distribution of learning outcomes with a reduction of about half a year of learning.
If the loss of learning is quantified in terms of labour market returns, the average student will face a reduction between $193 and $445 in yearly earnings once he or she enters the labour market, which represents between 2.8 per cent and 6.6 per cent of annual income.
Aggregated for all students in Pakistan, and projected twenty years into the future when all graduates have entered the labour market, this would cost the Pakistani economy between $67 billion in the gross domestic product (GDP) at net present value, it says.
According to the report, income elasticity in Pakistan is high for two reasons: high poverty levels, which lead families to push their children into labour or marriage from an early age; and the cost of private schooling in which 38 per cent of school-going children aged 6 to 10 were enrolled before the crisis.
“These numbers may be considered a lower bound of dropouts, given that estimates of growth are being continuously revised downward and we are still learning about the scale of income loss at the household level,” the report informed.
In one survey as many as 54 per cent of households in a random-digit-dialing study reported a substantial income loss. A Gallup survey from early in the crisis, found that as many as 27 per cents of families were considering not returning their children to school.
The report estimated that school closures during the pandemic will result in a loss of between 0.3 and 0.8 years of learning-adjusted schooling for the average student. Pakistani children currently spend 9.1 years in school on average, but they only accumulate 5.1 years of learning due to the low quality of the school system.
