The Priorities for South Asia

expected to rise because people are unable to be diagnosed or complete their treatment regimens.

In education, widespread school closures in 2020 led to a loss in learning, which was already at a low level prior to the pandemic. Lockdown measures in South Asia in the early months of the pandemic in 2020 were more stringent than those in Europe or North America, resulting in almost 400 million children out of primary and secondary schools, with a disproportionately negative impact on girls. An estimated 5.5 million students may drop out of the educational system. The projected learning loss for the region for the first five months of school closures after the onset of the pandemic, when remote learning opportunities were relatively limited, is 0.5 learning-adjusted years of schooling. Initial estimates put the loss in lifetime earnings per student at US$4,400, which is equivalent to 5 percent of total earnings (World Bank 2020).

Meanwhile, the pandemic has led to staggering job losses and disruptions for migrants, which will have longer-term economic consequences. About 50 million jobs have been lost in South Asia in the first phase of the pandemic.3 The return to Nepal and Bangladesh of hundreds of thousands of migrants from India and to South Asia from the Gulf countries has had large negative multiplier effects on households, adding to the pool of job seekers. In a region with the lowest rate of social protection coverage in the world, these numbers have translated into an increase in poverty and insecurity for the most vulnerable.

An immediate priority for the South Asia region is how to contain and recover rapidly from the shock to human capital outcomes and ensure rapid progress toward achieving better and more equitable outcomes. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic, globally and in the region, showed the important role that technologies are playing in different areas of the pandemic response—from the health sector response, including the accelerated development of new types of vaccines, to the use of digital technology in remote learning, to the rapid delivery of social assistance programs.4 It also showed the differential impact of technologies on countries and population groups.

Moreover, the profound converging technology revolution that is engulfing the world, which predates the pandemic, is altering the relationship between technology and human capital, and making it more complex by creating vast new opportunities for accelerating human capital outcomes while generating new and considerable risks. This convergence revolution is characterized by the merging of virtual, physical, biological, and cognitive technologies with the power of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI).5 As a result, biomedicine and the health sector have seen major developments in imaging, biomaterials, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, cellular technology, and medical robotics, and AI is increasingly used in diverse areas. Digitization combined with AI is creating the possibility of mass personalized learning—anywhere,