Nationwide School Closure Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible: UNICEF Chief

Prolonged school closure has wiped out decades of progress in education and a shadow pandemic of child labor, child marriage and mental health issues has taken hold, according to Henrietta Fore. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in lost learning for children worldwide and 2022 cannot be yet another year of disrupted education, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Henrietta Fore said. Prolonged school closure has wiped out decades of progress in education and a shadow pandemic of child labour, child marriage and mental health issues has taken hold, according to Henrietta Fore. “Nationwide school closures should be avoided whenever possible. When COVID-19 community transmission increases and stringent public health measures become a necessity, schools must be the last places to close and the first to re-open,” the UNICEF Chief said in December last year. Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO) said the continuous closure of schools would result in irreversible loss of learning for a generation of young children. “Keeping schools open must be a priority and can be safely done,” Ms Swaminathan Said. Henrietta Fore said that amid fears of Omicron, the new variant of concern, another wave of widespread school closures would be disastrous for children. “The evidence is clear: Prolonged, nationwide school closures; limited resources for students, teachers and parents; and lack of access to remote learning have wiped out decades of progress in education and rendered childhood unrecognizable. A shadow pandemic of child labour, child marriage and mental health issues has taken hold,” Ms Fore said. “Beyond lost learning, children have also lost the safety of school, daily in-person interactions with friends, access to healthcare, and, too often, their only nutritious meal of the day. This generation of schoolchildren could collectively lose USD 17 trillion in potential lifetime earnings…We know that mitigation measures in schools are effective. We must use this knowledge to do everything we can to keep schools open,” she added.