Free Compulsory Education Can Mitigate COVID-19 Disruptions’ Adverse Effects on Child Schooling

Developing countries are besieged with adverse income shocks, including climate hazards and pandemics. Yet these shocks' impacts on development outcomes are still not entirely well understood, owing to a lack of consensus in the literature. This paper uses an individual fixed-effect linear probability model to provide evidence on whether COVID-19 containment measures permanently affected children's schooling and if pre-existing education policies, like free compulsory education mandates, mitigated such adverse effects. Estimation results show that these containment measures had no statistically significant impact on children's school dropouts in Nigeria, nearly 15 months after the federal government lifted them. However, when we distinguish between children whose schooling was free and compulsory and those whose education was not, we find that these measures increased the latter's dropout probabilities but not the former. Therefore, our findings suggest that pre-existing policies like free compulsory education can mitigate the adverse impact of negative aggregate income shocks.