Children need action not warm words on learning poverty

Children need action not warm words on learning poverty

In my years working with the charity Save the Children, I was often humbled by parents and children in the most desperate circumstances keeping alive the hope that comes with education. One 12-year-old refugee from South Sudan told me: “Education is everything — nothing will stop me getting back to school.”

The contrast with the international effort to shield education from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic could not be more striking.

The hopes of millions of children and the human development of nations hang in the balance. The secretary-general of the UN has warned of a “generational catastrophe” in education. Yet the decisionmakers shaping the pandemic response have been gripped by collective inertia. We need decisive international action.

The pandemic did not create the learning crisis. Half of 10-year-olds in the poorest developing countries were already unable to read and 260m children were out of school. Those numbers will now surge. While rich countries, and children from wealthier homes in poor countries, turned to online learning, those on the wrong side of the digital divide have been left behind.

Unesco estimates that, without remedial action, learning losses could eliminate the gains of the past two decades. The World Bank warns that the ranks