Pursuing new approaches to deliver quality education is key

In-person schooling in Bangladesh has remained shut since March 2020. Children have already lost a full year, equivalent to 0.6 learning-adjusted years of schooling based on the learning gap implied by the World Bank (WB) in its Human Capital Index (2020) for Bangladesh. The longer they are out of the formal schooling system, the greater will be the erosion of the foundational skills they had acquired, not to speak of what they would have added to those if the school year were not lost.

Education is generally associated with higher productivity which in turn translates into higher earnings. The science of brain development shows that the productivity effects depend on learning inside and outside of the formal schooling system. However, formal education is critical at early stages because it imparts structured and systematic form of learning. The loss in schooling caused by the pandemic is, therefore, likely to cause loss of lifetime earnings.