Learning on Hold: The Toll of COVID-19 School Closures on Mozambique's Foundational Literacy

In Mozambique, the COVID-19 pandemic led to schools closing for 80 percent of the 2020 academic year, affecting 8.5 million students and nearly 15,000 schools across the country (United Nations, 2020). This brief seeks to address two crucial questions regarding Mozambique's Grade 3 and 4 students. First, what is the current state of reading outcomes of these students, and how have they been affected by the prolonged school closures? Second, how do children's individual, household and school characteristics relate to literacy outcomes? An analysis of pre- and post-pandemic reading skills, using data from the Avaliação Longitudinal da Desistência Escolar (ALDE, Longitudinal Assessment of School Dropout) reveals significant learning losses in basic literacy skills. Across the country, children in Grades 3-4 showed reduced proficiency in identifying letters in 2021, compared to students in the same grades in 2019.