AHI acknowledges that health, education and income are strongly interconnected throughout the course of a lifetime. In early life, healthier children achieve better results at school. Later in life, educated people are more likely to understand their health needs, follow health instructions, advocate for themselves and their families, and communicate effectively with health providers. Furthermore, poor health and a low level of education are associated with a lack of job opportunities. Better-educated workers tend to have a higher income, which has a major, positive effect on health since a higher income enables a healthier lifestyle. Protecting the quality of schoolchildren’s education is therefore fundamental to our objective: preserving and protecting health and advancing the education of people throughout the world. AHi CIO believes that quality education must not be interrupted even in the face of national disasters including epidemics. Otherwise, children will fall so far behind in this period that they will never catch up with their peers or, worse still, they will fall out of formal education, never to return. 

Most schools have chosen to use e-learning in order to continue schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. This approach to keeping schoolchildren engaged with education places many of them at a huge disadvantage in comparison with their more affluent counterparts. It also presents low-income communities with a major operational challenge given the lack of laptops, home broadband or phone credit, and with children having to share devices. Insufficient space, general fear around technology and literacy issues all compound the situation.

To avoid further increase in education inequity, localities where schools are closed should delivery education through local radio stations and television channels, since nearly everyone in the world has a radio or television at home. Furthermore, most countries have educational television channels that can be used to deliver school teaching. Ideally, a large pool of schools would contribute teaching to broadcasts of televised lessons and arrange a buddy system for homework with older siblings at home and with school teachers by telephone. If tele-schooling is not possible, all schools serving a small, low-income community can contribute teaching for transmission by a local radio station. School teachers should also engage school children in at-home physical activity. This approach would address the impact of closing schools due to the COVID-19 on marginalised sectors of society and prevent increasing inequities in education.