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06 September 2021 One of the heaviest consequences of Covid is having burned the future of a generation forever.

A lost and irrecoverable future.

The school is the mirror of this social and educational fraying.

The data from Save the Children, the international organization that has been fighting for over 100 years to save children at risk and guarantee them a future, are alarming.



In the world

In a quarter of the countries of the world, the education of hundreds of millions of children is in danger of collapsing. Already before the pandemic, 258 million children worldwide, one sixth of the total school age population, lacked access to education and today it is estimated that 10-16 million children are at risk of not returning to school due to the economic consequences of Covid-19. The reasons for a double reversal of living conditions and poverty children are forced to work or marry at 10, 12 years.



Italy

A risk that does not spare even the students in Italy where there are schools, but not everyone can afford it and that after a year and a half of DAD, they recorded a serious loss of learning, with an "implicit dispersion" that rises by 2 , 5 points in the national average, with important territorial disparities and a dramatic impact on the South.



Inequalities

According to the analyzes of Save the Children, also contained in the new "Build Forward Better" report, launched by the Organization on the eve of the opening of the school year in Italy, there are millions of children who cannot enter the classroom due to safety measures for Covid-19, for the economic impact of the pandemic on families. A condition that worsens in low-income countries: the countries with "extreme risk" education systems - according to the index drawn up by Save the Children - are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Mali and Libya, followed by Syria and Yemen in "high risk".



The future? Many will not be able to read

The future torn by the pandemic also means that 2030 20% of young people between 14 and 24 and 30% of adults will not be able to read. Penalize girls. and girls are even more penalized than their male peers. There are, in fact, 9 million girls: 9 million will not have a place in the classroom Furthermore, more than half of the 720 million elementary school students, about 382 million, have a very low level of education, do not go to school or are below the minimum level of proficiency in reading. In addition, the number of children whose learning has deteriorated could actually increase by another 72 million due to the Covid-19 pandemic.



Italy "implicit irritation"

Here we speak of "implicit irritation", that is, that sufficient levels are not reached both in Italian and in mathematics at the end of the education process. An “implied irritation”, another term we will have to learn in this pandemic, has increased from 7 to 9.5% on a national basis. The crux is the social economic gap that Covid has brought out exponentially. In the North, only 2.6% of the graduates were implicitly dispersed, in the Center 8.8% and in the South 14.8. Beyond numbers and percentages, we return to the starting point, that is to adolescents, the older students who have paid and will pay for these 2 years more than the decline in skills, and they are also those who have totaled the most weeks in DAD.



The climate

Complicating this emergency picture is climate change, which is not an emergency today but by many. It is not easy for some 75 million children to go to school if cyclones, floods and droughts hit. 50 million have left everything. And it's not easy to connect a computer when there is only mud around.



Another page is the conflicts: "the attacks on schools in countries like Nigeria and Yemen, the situation in Syria and finally that of Afghanistan where even before the escalation of violence, boys and especially girls were struggling to attend school and now risk not to see the benches again ", says Daniela Fatarella, Director General of Save the Children Italy.



Recent estimates show that school closures due to Covid-19 could lead to a reduction in global economic growth equivalent to an annual rate of 0.8%, with higher losses in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries. In fact, a recent Save the Children research found that on average, during the pandemic, children from poorer countries lost 66% more school days than their peers living in richer countries. . Added to this are other factors that will have serious consequences for the next generation including the high rate of youth unemployment, poor primary education and the digital divide that prevents access to distance learning. Consequences that do not fall only on learning,but also on the psychological condition of boys and girls.