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decision- makers should keep schools open and increase instructional time, assess learning and match instruction to students' learning level, implement targeted catch-up policies such as tutoring for children who have fallen the furthest behind, and streamline curricula to focus on foundational learning. To minimize dropouts, countries should track students at risk of dropping out, especially in transition years, and alleviate the financial constraints to school aendance. Youth have suffered from sharp declines in their job prospects, and the extent to which employment has recovered varies a great deal across countries. Appropriate policies will therefore vary by country—in particular, by the extent to which there has been a recovery of both adult and youth employment. For coun- tries where neither adult nor youth employment has recovered, policies should primarily be geared toward demand-side interventions that spur firms to start hiring again. For countries where adult employment has recovered but youth employment has not, support for supply-side policies such as adapted training, job inter- mediation, entrepreneurship programs, and new workforce-oriented initiatives for youth are all important. Countries where both adult and youth employment have recovered should monitor developments in the labor market to ensure that the recovery has been equal across groups. In all countries, policies should recog- nize that youth are a diverse group and that skills are the best insurance against a crisis. Building agile, resilient, and adaptive human development systems for future shocks The COVID-19 pandemic has arguably been the largest global shock to human capital in the past century. Moreover, countries will continue to face shocks in the future—health and climate emergencies, natural disasters, and macroeconomic crises—that, like the pandemic, can erode human capital across the life cycle. In addition to impeding human capital accumulation at each stage of the life cycle, the pandemic has revealed systemic weaknesses in how governments integrate efforts across sectors to address the multidi- mensional nature of human capital deficits. In some cases, interventions in health will be most appropriate to address specific losses in human capital; in others, it may be that education or social protection policies are most effective. But in most cases, countries need solutions that bring these sectors together into a holistic human development system. Evidence suggests that during the COVID-19 crisis, very few countries responded with integrated approaches, and most countries lacked the capacity to collect and link data from programs in different sectors. Such a human development system should build on existing sector-specific systems and individual programs to take a broader look at how investments in human capital could be coordinated and how complementarities could be exploited. In a crisis, human development systems can help policy makers resolve trade-offs across many competing needs in a constrained fiscal environment. To be effective, such systems should have three key characteristics: 1. They should be agile, resilient, and adaptive and able to expand and contract quickly during crises to reach vulnerable groups. 2. They should have a mandate and authority to coordinate across sectors, identify interventions that are complementary, and resolve trade-offs. 3. They should be data-driven, effectively use technology, and identify problems and "pain points" as a crisis unfolds. To build these systems, countries need to invest in data collection and information systems to provide targeted support when required. They also need to leverage technology to deliver services (including cross-sectoral beneficiary registries, platforms, and payment systems) and to invest in coordination mech- anisms (including joint commiees with representation from all ministries involved in aspects of human capital). Finally, countries should invest in flexible payment systems and contractual mechanisms that allow for the rapid reallocation of resources in response to an evolving crisis. Executive Summary 11

• Front Cover
• Contents
• Main Messages
• Executive Summary
• The pandemic destroyed human capital at critical moments in the life cycle
• Policies to reverse human capital losses
• Building agile, resilient, and adaptive human development systems for future shocks
• A human capital recovery: What will it take?
• Notes
• References
• Figures
• Figure ES.1 The pandemic led to steep losses in early childhood development and early learning in very young children in Bangladesh and Brazil
• Figure ES.2 During the pandemic, each month of school closures led to one month of learning losses, and more so in countries with lower GDP per capita
• Figure ES.3 Youth employment fell in most countries during the pandemic
• Figure ES.4 Declines in employment of young people during the pandemic were not offset by increases inschooling or training
• Figure ES.5 What are the paths to recovery?
• Table
• Table ES.1 There are evidence-proven policies that can reverse human capital losses