According to a study, girls are more affected by the effects of the pandemic than boys. This is the result of a survey published in London today, for which the children’s rights organization Save the Children asked a total of 25,000 children and adults in 37 countries around the world, many of them in Asia and Africa.
According to the study, girls learned less at school during this time and had to do more housework than boys. Children from poor families are also more affected than those from wealthier families.
In most states, schools were completely closed for several weeks and classes were held online, if at all. Every fifth girl surveyed stated that they had not learned anything during this time. With the boys it was only one in ten.
In poor families in particular, this was primarily due to the lack of access to the Internet: Less than one percent of households that classified themselves as poor were able to guarantee the necessary access to the Internet. In better-off households, one in five families surveyed had access to the Internet. Obtaining learning materials was also often a problem for poor households.
Almost two-thirds of the girls surveyed said they had to work in the household more often than before during the pandemic, while this was not even the case with half of the boys. The girls were also more in demand when looking after siblings.
