Disclosable Restructuring Paper - Early Childhood Education Project - P145544

However, the two related to child stimulation and learning, and the one related to teachers, have yet to achieve their target as shown in the following table. [...] Consequently, the government has not been able to provide the NSMP allocation to schools as expected, which has affected the achievement of the intermediate indicator on the number of pre-primary and primary school children receiving school meals. [...] Furthermore, the survey reveals important welfare disparities in engagement in distance learning with a 7-percentage points difference in the likelihood of children from households classified in the bottom 40 being engaged in remote learning compared to the those from the top 60. [...] Without effective remedial action, students in Lao PDR are expected to lose around 0.2 learning adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) and up to 8 percent of students between ages 6 and 18 are expected to drop out of school because of the pandemic.2 The loss in LAYS would translate to a loss of US$121 in average annual earning per student (2017 PPP) or US$2,203 loss to lifetime earnings of a single in [...] This restructuring is proposed to account for the delays in implementation of project activities due to COVID-19 closures and to support the government in better recovering and responding to the impact of the pandemic on the education system.