Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has closed schools for over 1.6 billion children, with potentially long-term consequences. This paper provides some of the first experimental evidence on strategies to minimise the fallout of the pandemic on education outcomes. The authors evaluate two low-technology interventions to substitute schooling during this period: SMS text messages and direct phone calls. They conduct a rapid trial in Botswana to inform real-time policy responses collecting data at four- to six-week intervals. The paper present results from the first wave. The authors find early evidence that both interventions result in cost-effective learning gains of 0.16 to 0.29 standard deviations. This translates to a reduction in innumeracy of up to 52%. The authors show these results broadly hold with a series of robustness tests that account for differential attrition. They find increased engagement from parents regarding their child’s education and more accurate parent perceptions of their child’s learning. In a second wave of the trial, the authors provide targeted instruction, customising text messages to the child's learning level using data from the first wave. The low-tech interventions tested have immediate policy relevance and could have long-run implications for the role of technology and parents as substitutes or complements to the traditional education system.