Two years of COVID-19 related disruptions to teaching have taken their toll on literacy around the world.
A recent report from the World Bank found globally, between February 2020 and February 2022, education systems were fully closed for in-person schooling for about 141 days on average. The end result has been what UNICEF Chief of Education Robert Jenkins says is “a nearly insurmountable scale of loss to children’s schooling”.
The loss to learning has been felt even in countries with high access to the internet and higher levels of digital skills among the teaching force, but for children in low and middle-income countries the impact has been acute.
