Livelihood, Education and Mental well-being of children during COVID19 pandemic: Some ground insights

- If we imagine the most powerful impact on the economy, education, health and livelihood in the world today, we find nothing more impactful than COVID19. It can be considered superior and stronger than nuclear in many aspects as it has exposed immense impacts not only in specified aspects and regions but in entire aspects and regions worldwide.

Certainly, people of all walks of lives all over the world have suffered badly in so many aspects-among these livelihoods and education can be identified as a key to all sorts of devastation. Considering this fact as a matter of concern, the Magic Bus India Foundation with its good exposure and experience in dealing with livelihood and childhood have come up with certain ground facts by conducting an in-depth survey in 21 states across India.

Their survey would try to address the issues resulted by the global pandemic and how life skills education helped millions of children confront the present situation with their soft competencies.

Impacts on livelihood

· Loss of jobs: The Govt. order of nationwide lockdown and shutting down of small scale industries and all sorts of govt. and private companies have made a loss of millions of jobs in the country. As per the report by the Center for Monitoring Indian Economic (CMIE), 1 of 4 employees lost jobs in India between March and April. This is the main reason that the Indian unemployment rate has risen to 27.11% with 29.22% in urban and 26.69% in rural areas. Moreover, as a piece of evidence, this massive devastation in terms of sources of income has also decreased monthly household incomes as findings show;

73% of household income has been decreased;

55% of households have been reported as 0% income during a lockdown and

41% of households have been reported borrowing money from others to sustain their essential needs.

Impacts on Education

· Parents can’t afford to buy essential resources required for their child’s education during lockdown: If we look at the broad perspectives of access to resources, it is connected to the sources of income. If the parent’s source of income has blocked, then parents would not be able to focus on a child’s education. The fact is, as far as the need of the hour most of the educational functionaries are opting online education system, but such a platform also made the marginalized societies difficult to access as they are not having essential equipment such as Android phones and laptops with internet connections.

Impacts on mental well-being:

Mental wellbeing describes our mental state- how we are feeling and how well we can cope with day to day life and its dynamics. In fact, the mental wellbeing is itself dynamic, it can change from moment to moment, day to day, month to month or year to year (mind.org.uk).

Mental health is often treated as very serious matter thus; children’s mental well-being must be conserved safely. However, this lockdown has brought enormous negative impacts on the child’s mental well-being. Because staying indoors without any exposure is something connected to the child’s emotions. As evidence,

37% of children have sadness,

7% of children have frustrations and anxiety,

5% are having fear and

2% of children are having depressions.

This figure predicts about critical symptoms of a child’s severe mental health in future if the lockdown is to be extended for some months.

Image source: twitter.com/nhshullccg/

Life skill education helped children to deal with the current situations

Despite, doctor’s medication in order to prevent COVID19 patients- competencies of life skills helped millions of people to be safe from COVID19 infections. Life skills education for the children remains to be a perfect preventive measures from such virus as they are always familiar in terms of healthy foods, hygienic management, self-management, emotion control, decision making etc, which are core essential skills to fight against the virus as well as depression. The report witnesses that 82% of children who had a life skills sessions facilitated by Magic Bus India Foundation have got help in dealing with the present COVID19 situations.

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Reflection is contributed by:

Satyasing Mushahary, an alumnus of Azim Premji University (2014-16)

Satyasing was previously working for Magic Bus project in Assam.

Currenlty working as Senior Consultant @ CLF India.1

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