NEW DELHI: The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Thursday, September 9, said that hundreds of millions of children in South Asia are presently suffering because their schools have been closed due to coronavirus and they lack online devices and connections for remote learning. UNICEF has asked authorities to prioritise safe reopening of schools.
According to the UN agency, even before the pandemic, nearly 60 per cent of children in the densely populated region were unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of 10. George Laryea-Adjei, Regional Director for South Asia, UNICEF, said that school closures in South Asia owing to the COVID-19 pandemic have further aggravated the issue of accessibility to education. He said that it has forced hundreds of millions of children and their teachers to transition to remote learning in a region with low connectivity and low device affordability. Even at times when a family has access to technology, children are not always able to access it. As a result, children have been suffering enormous setbacks in their learning journey, he added.
In its report based on research conducted in India, the Maldives, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, UNICEF said that due to school closures since the pandemic started, over 434 million children have been affected in South Asia. The report added that significant populations of children were learning considerably less in comparison to pre-pandemic levels. It noted that 80 per cent of children aged 14 to 18 in India reported lower levels of learning than when they attended schools physically. Moreover, 42 per cent of children aged 6 and 13 reported that they were not having any remote learning during closure of physical schools.