A generational catastrophe: COVID-19 and children’s access to education and food in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, children have been put at greater risk of school drop-out, as well as food insecurity and emotional health deterioration. This paper considers these issues as they have occurred in South Africa. We use all waves of the National Income Dynamics Study–Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey to estimate non-return to school, access to school meals, and household well-being. The number of learners not attending school in 2021 is estimated to be close to quadruple pre-pandemic levels. Combined with estimates of learning lost, we can conclude that the pandemic has worn away at two decades of progress made in basic education. Evidence also indicates that school feeding has been slow to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Deepened levels of household hunger combined with a lack of access to free school meals is indicated to contribute to significantly greater levels of caregiver anxiety and psychological distress.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• attendance
• dropout
• household well-being
• Covid-19
• South Africa

JEL CODES:

• I24
• I14
• I31

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 NIDS-CRAM data is available on DataFirst's Open Data Portal (datafirst.uct.ac.za).

2 For more detail on the NIDS-CRAM weighting approach, see Ingle et al (2021).

3 Given attrition of 28.7% between Waves 1 and 3, a top-up sample was introduced in Wave 3 resulting in 1 084 additional interviews.

4 Given widespread school closure at the time of NIDS-CRAM Wave 1, questions were limited to access to remote learning (i.e. school books, education programs on TV and/or the radio, and access to educational content online).

5 According to the GHS 2017, 2018 and 2019 data, approximately 4-6% of households with school-going children as residents report more than one child enrolled in the same grade.

6 An expanded discussion of the preliminary analyses to that which is presented in this paper can be found in an updated technical note to our NIDS-CRAM Wave 5 report at https://resep.sun.ac.za/education/reports-policy-briefs/.

7 The analysis presented in this section represents an update to the existing analysis of the report by Shepherd and Mohohlwane (2021). Also see the updated technical note to our NIDS-CRAM Wave 5 report at https://resep.sun.ac.za/education/reports-policy-briefs/.

8 Specifically: $290,000\times 1.86\times \left({\displaystyle \frac{10\text{\%}}{5.3\text{\%}}}\right)-290,000=727,726$. Lower and upper bound estimates calculated in a similar fashion are approximately 675,000 and 772,000.

9 November 25 2020, ‘Over 300 000 South African children may have dropped out of primary school during COVID-19’, accessed from Global Citizen, by Khanyi Mhlaba.

10 A motion of automatic progression implemented for learners in grades 1–3 at the end of 2020 was supported by the Council of Education Ministers (CEM).

11 Equal Education and others v Department of Basic Education and others (2020).

12 Similar to the attendance questions, the reference period in Wave 3 is 7 days whilst for Wave 5 it was extended to 14 days.

13 This proportion is arrived at through responses to two questions contained in the ‘Education’ section of the GHS questionnaire: ‘Does [child] attend a school where food is given as part of the school feeding scheme/Government nutrition programme?’ and ‘[If yes], does [child] eat the food provided? Every day, a few times a week, sometimes, or not at all?’

14 The Child Support grant (CSG) of R445 per child per month in 2020 was topped up by R300 per child in May 2020. Between June and October 2020, a CSG top-up of R500 was allocated per caregiver. All other grants were topped up by R250 per month from May to October 2020.

15 Specifically, those responding sometimes/often/always to the question ‘In the past 12 months, did any child (17 years or younger) in this household go hungry because there wasn’t enough food?’

16 The question included in the questionnaires for Wave 2 through Wave 5 was ‘How worried are you about learners in your household returning to school during the COVID-19 pandemic? Not worried, a little worried, or very worried?’

17 This was measured using the Patient Health Questionnaire-2 (PHQ-2) instrument (Kroenke et al, 2009). A respondent is said to suffer from depressed mood if the total score on two questions (scored on a 4-point scale scored from 0 to 3) is 3 or higher; specifically; ‘Over the last 2 weeks, have you had little interest or pleasure in doing things? Not at all, several days, more than half the days, or nearly every day?’ and ‘Over the last 2 weeks, have you been feeling down, depressed or hopeless? Not at all, several days, more than half the days, or nearly every day?’

18 October 9, 2021, ‘Motshekga says government still working on full return of students to school’, accessed from BusinessTech, by Staff Writer.

19 November 8, 2021, ‘Push for fewer lockdown restrictions at South Africa’s schools’, accessed from BusinessTech, by Staff Writer.