YONA: The challenges have been complex and multifaceted. First and foremost COVID-19’s impact on girls’ education, including prolonged school closures in many parts of the world and disruptions in learning, have exacerbated existing inequalities.

Girls living in poverty and living in remote locations, girls with disabilities, and girls doubly impacted by COVID and conflict became even more marginalized and excluded from accessing educational opportunities.

In many of the communities Plan works families did not have the means or capacity to support girls with remote learning, particularly if it involved digital connectivity or inaccessible technology. Couple this with the impacts of the pandemic on household income and we saw a marked rise in Child, Early and Forced Unions & Marriages (CEFUM), early an unintended pregnancy, and an increase in exploitatiative and harmful practices.

In Indonesia, a country that had made significant progress in elimnating CEFUM over the last decade, 18 provinces reported that the rate of child marriage increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, citing both school closures and ecomonic hardship as key factors to the rise.

For girls who have had access to digital connectivity we saw increased reports of online harassment, abuse, and exploitation and many reported feeling mental distress from an unsafe online environment, social isolation, and lack of access to resources and support.

We are concerned that many girls will not return to school once they are open and that hard-fought progress we’ve made in girls’ education and gender equality more broadly will be eroded.

OLANIKE: The onset of the pandemic shifted the priorities of Teenage Network. Initially, we provided comprehensive sexuality education and life skill learning for adolescent girls in the classroom. At present we now focus on reintegrating adolescent mothers into school and changing harmful socio-cultural norms that promote violence against adolescent girls in communities.

The six-month Covid-19 school lockdown in Nigeria created a major setback for our work. A direct result of the lockdown saw a significant number of parents refusing to send their daughters to school. Girls were forced into labor, predisposing them to sexual violence, which resulted in unwanted pregnancy for several girls or child marriage which was done in exchange for money.

YONA: We’ve seen great adaptations and pivots in many of our education programs to support girls impacted by COVID-19. Many of the adaptations have come from our experience working in crisis context and our long-standing expertise in education in emergencies.

In Sierra Leone, for example, a country that was gravely impacted by the Ebola crisis, we built on our low-tech radio learning program and ensured community mobilization as well as radio lessons promoted gender equality and girls’ rights.

Similarly in Ghana, we worked together with the Ministry of Education to ensure remote learning could take place via television lessons that consciously addressed gender bias and stereotypes and promoted gender equality.

In Colombia, we used WhatsApp to deliver lessons and provide tutoring support for girls living in remote locations and in Burkina Faso and Mali we will utilize accelerated learning modalities to ensure girls are able to catch up on missed learning and more easily return to formal schooling.

OLANIKE: Currently, the biggest needs of adolescent girls in the Covid-19 pandemic are accessing learning resources and sexual and reproductive health services. A significant number of adolescent girls in Nigeria were unable to receive an education during the COVID-19 school lockdown because they lacked access to digital learning devices.

Although there were affordable radio school programs, adolescent girls were unable to engage in it effectively, because they were forced to work. 80 percent of the adolescent girls, we worked with at Teenage Network were engaged in some form of child labor from Monday-to-Friday, weekly. Adolescent girls became more vulnerable to violence without frequent access to gender-based violence services due to the restrictions.

OLANIKE: Our priority ask from policymakers is to bridge the learning gap created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Through returning girls who dropped out of school, ensuring digital equality and strengthening school systems to prevent violence and to provide needed intervention for survivors.

Millions of girls have had to drop out of school as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a major setback for the Sustainable Development Goals. Therefore, any COVID-19 recovery plan that does not address the educational and safety needs of girls is not holistic and acceptable. As social change leaders, we must actively engage and hold policymakers accountable.

YONA: First and foremost is to listen to girls! Include girls and young women whose education and safety has been impacted by COVID-19 in policy dialogue and decision making. Too many decisions about girls’ lives get made by men who don’t fully understand what girls need to thrive.

Also hugely important is financing. I’m very concerned about current funding trends and austerity measures taken by governments in their COVID-19 recovery plans, which seem to cut education and other social services first. Cuts to public social services hurt girls and women the most and we cannot have a just recovery without proper investment.

And lastly, to ensure we not only transform education delivery in order to make quality learning more accessible for all during times of disruption (COVID-19 won’t be the first or last global crisis — think climate crisis!), but to also take this critical opportunity to transform and decolonize our curriculum, pedagogies and textbooks.

Education has a huge potential to transform patriarchal beliefs and harmful gender norms that perpetuate violence and harmful practices. Gender Transformative Education can and should be the new norm as we build back equal.