Data shows urgent need for education intervention

“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.” Samuel Beckett’s iconic quip in Waiting for Godot encapsulates the way it’s felt waiting for a vaccine in South Africa. During the peak of the first wave last year a study conducted by an academic consortium National Income Dynamics Study — Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (Nids-Cram), offered policymakers unrivalled insights into almost real time impacts of the coronavirus lockdown on households across the country. Last week Wave 4 was published, and the findings are equally fascinating as the impact of school closures on educational inequality call out for urgent policy interventions. This penultimate wave of the survey helps provide a window of insight into the state of South African society during the onset of the second wave of Covid-19. Michael Avery spoke to Nic Spaull, an economist at Stellenbosch University and the co-principal investigator of the Nids-Cram study; Mpumi Mohohlwane, Deputy Director: Research, Monitoring & Evaluation. Department of Basic Education; & Ronelle Burger, professor in the Economics Department of Stellenbosch University.