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During the pandemic, most countries were able to expand existing programs in all sectors, but especially in health and social protection. For example, Argentina relied on expansions of Programa Sumar to ensure access to health care for the unemployed. Social protection programs grew rapidly during the pandemic, reaching nearly 1.4 billion people (17 percent of the world's population) over 2020–21. Notably, countries that had made earlier investments in technology, such as in interoperable beneficiary identification and payment systems, were able to expand social assistance coverage faster. Some countries were also able to retool, redirect, or reactivate programs built in response to earlier shocks. Sierra Leone adapted the social safety net systems set up to respond to Ebola, flooding, and landslides for use in rolling out cash transfers and providing additional types of support during the pandemic. Some countries were able to engage service providers beyond the traditional public sector to deliver services. For example, in 2020 and 2021 the Indian state of Kerala contracted with more than 300 private hospitals so it could add them to the publicly funded insurance scheme for the poor and vulnerable to help sustain service delivery during the pandemic. This expansion—effectively more than doubling the number of private hospitals in the scheme—built on years of previous engagement of the private sector by the state government. Uruguay was able to move from in-person instruction to remote learning during the pandemic thanks to Plan Ceibal, a functional remote-learning program launched in 2007 that has helped ensure access to free laptops for students and teachers, has provided them with internet connections, and, critically, has trained teachers in remote instruction over the last decade. By contrast, truly cross-sectoral approaches were rare. By and large, countries failed to assess the costs and benefits of specific sectoral policies jointly. The timing and length of lockdowns and mobility restrictions generally did not take into account the coverage of social protection, which made it difficult for households to comply with the restrictions. Keeping schools closed for as long as many countries did, even aer restrictions on the use of public transportation had been lied, and markets, stores, movie theaters, and restaurants had opened, reflected a failure to balance competing risks—the risk of infection in schools (low) relative to the risk of learning losses (high)—and to update policy choices as new information became available. A human capital recovery: What will it take? Table ES.1 lists, for each phase of the life cycle, policy recommendations for recovering from pandemic- induced human capital losses and building resilience for the next shock. The list is long, particularly in the context of competing crises and tight fiscal space. Which policies should countries put at the top of their human capital recovery list? First, an emphasis on transition periods in the life cycle—from early childhood to school age, from one level of education to another, from school to work, and from youth to adulthood—can help stem the accumulation of losses. Transitions are defining moments: what happens during these stages may generate deficits that interfere with the entire trajectory of human capital accumulation in subsequent stages of the life cycle. Second, the report also provides evidence on the full cost of each proposed policy. This full cost includes fiscal costs, as well as costs stemming from implementation complexity and political commitment required. It highlights that many of the proposed policies do not require important fiscal efforts. Rather, they require institutional capacity building and political will. Recovery is possible, and many countries have already made progress in recovering losses in human capital that arose from the pandemic. In Pakistan, for example, more than 1.2 million children missed immuni- zations during the first year of the pandemic, but intensive outreach efforts, in part enabled by an electronic immunization registry, contributed to successful catch-up efforts that had immunized 76 percent of these children by March 2021. 23 In Tamil Nadu, India, school-age children exhibited severe deficits in reading and math when they returned to in-person learning aer pandemic-induced school closures. Aer six months, two-thirds of the losses had been recovered, with 24 percent of the recovery aributable to government-run aer-school catch-up programs. 24 The pandemic may have led to a clear-cut collapse in human capital, but what is needed to get on a path of recovery is equally clear. Transforming the collapse into a recovery should begin now. 12 Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do about It