The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected employment for young people around the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on women and girls globally, widening existing inequalities in livelihoods, burden of care, schooling, and violence.Designing social policies to mitigate these impacts and support educational opportunities for girls—including to help them return to school and strengthen the skills they need to succeed in the workforce—is critical to post-pandemic economic recovery and gender equality.To understand the extent of these issues, and to shed light on the pandemic’s particularly hidden impacts on vulnerable girls, policymakers have needed data and evidence.

On March 18, IPA and J-PAL co-organized a closed-door roundtable discussion in Kenya, as inputs to the Population Policy for National Development, which is currently being revised.The event was co-hosted with the National Council for Population Development, the agency spearheading the policy revisions and that will have oversight over its implementation.