Report: Learning Poverty in Morocco Reaches 65.3% Amid COVID-19 Crisis

Rabat – Learning poverty in Morocco among children aged 10 has reached 65.8% overall, 61.3% for girls and 70.1% for boys, according to a recent report from the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF.

Titled “The State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery,” the report shed light on the global disruption to education caused by COVID-19 pandemic.

It shows that learning poverty has been steadily increased in low- and middle-income countries.

While the rate of learning poverty in these countries had already reached 53% before the pandemic, it has continued to grow exponentially in recent months and is now close to reaching 70% due to the ineffectiveness of remote learning.

In another report titled “COVID-19 Learning Losses: Rebuilding Quality Learning for All in the Middle East and North Africa,” the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF jointly concluded that MENA economies could lose up to $800 billion in lifetime earnings for the current cohort of learners.

The report further explained the loss would be due to students’ lower levels of learning, their lost months of school, or their potential for dropping out of school.

In Morocco, the inability to read and understand a simple text at the age of ten, is 65.8%, with a potential rise to 72.1%, 74.1%, or 76.6% in worst case scenarios, the report highlighted.

Both Morocco and Jordan are expected to have similar increases in their learning poverty gaps and need to focus on policies to identify the diversity of learning needs among children below minimum proficiency, the report added.

In the case of Morocco’s economic expectations, the report outlines a loss of about $35 billion in the optimistic scenario and $58 billion in the pessimistic scenario.

The report also points out that while almost every country has offered distance learning opportunities to students, the quality of these initiatives varies.

As for remote education delivery systems, Morocco has deployed paper based take-home materials for parents/students, as well as television, radio, and online learning platforms to boost its distance learning strategy for all education levels.

However, the learning poverty severity in the country stands at 11.6%, the third highest in the MENA region after Egypt (12.3%) and Yemen (44.2%).

More than 200 million learners from low- and lower-middle-income countries are unprepared to deploy distance learning during emergency school closures, the report warns.

The reopening of schools must therefore remain a top and urgent priority on a global scale, the report recommends, to stem and reverse learning losses. It also recommends that countries put in place learning recovery programs with the aim of ensuring that current students acquire at least the same skills as the previous ones.