Virus feared to halt girls’ studies

Global shutdowns have pushed some 1.5 billion students out of school since March, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, including 111 million girls in the world’s least developed countries.

The previous epidemic in West Africa forced more girls than boys to halt their studies in the ensuing years, from 2014 to 2016, researchers say, dimming economic prospects for a generation of young women. Educators fear the coronavirus pandemic could trigger another wave of dropouts.

The disruptions are projected to end or seriously delay the education of 10 million secondary-school age girls, according to an April report from the Malala Fund, which analyzed data from Sierra Leone’s Ebola crisis.

Girls in Nigeria and Liberia said in phone interviews that they are worried about falling behind or having to quit altogether, citing distractions at home and financial hits from the lockdowns.

Parents in more traditionally conservative nations tend to prioritize the education of their sons, experts say. In West and Central Africa, 73% of boys older than 15 can read, compared with 60% of girls in the same age group.

So when families lose income, they’re more likely to stretch the budget on schooling for boys, said Laila Gad, UNICEF’s representative in Liberia, a former Ebola hot spot.

Remote learning, she added, is especially burdensome for girls, who are frequently expected to shoulder more cooking, cleaning and babysitting. They’re also more vulnerable to sexual abuse, pregnancy and child marriage during unsupervised downtime.

“Schools are much more than a learning environment,” Gad said. “They provide a protective environment for girls.”

Before the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, 8% of girls did not attend grade school, according to the Malala Fund report. That share nearly tripled in the aftermath.

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In Guinea, another hot spot, girls were 25% less likely than boys to reenroll when life settled back to normal.

And in Sierra Leone, teen pregnancy jumped as much as 65% in some areas. School attendance fell by 16% among 4,800 teenage girls tracked in another study.

Mari Kalokoh, who is 18, didn’t plan to drop out during the Ebola crisis, but the closures removed a crucial structure from her days.

She passed the afternoons with her boyfriend and got pregnant. Her parents kicked her out of the house.

At the time, Sierra Leone banned expectant mothers from school. Kalokoh survived on scraps from strangers. She lost her baby in childbirth.

Grief clouded everything. Then she found a charity that helped her enroll again. This lockdown, she’s learning English with the help of radio classes. Kalokoh aims to graduate and eventually study law.

Eric Tahe, a grade school teacher in northern Ivory Coast, shares that mission.

When his classroom reopened last month, one of his students, a 14-year-old girl, returned pregnant. He visited her parents at home, urging them: Keep her in school.

“Most of the time with the girls, their parents think their place is at home — doing chores, getting ready for a family,” Tahe said. “We worried they’d use the pandemic as an excuse not to send girls back to school.”

During two months of lockdown this spring, the teachers met with moms and dads, explaining the importance of remote homework. Too many chores could throw their daughters off the academic track.

The campaign seemed to work.

“Seventy of seventy-four kids came back,” he said. Two boys and two girls are missing, he said, but only because their families moved to bigger cities.

Information for this article was contributed by Sabato Neufville of The Washington Post.