Climate shocks, disability, and mathematics learning in sub-Saharan Africa

Source abstract

Climate shocks already disrupt schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. Children with disabilities, for their part, face deep barriers to enrolment, retention and achievement across the region. A smaller body of work suggests that climate shocks in early childhood may also raise the number of children who become disabled. These three literatures have grown up apart, and none has been tied to the economics of human capital. This review brings together four strands of evidence. They cover climate-related disruption and mathematics achievement, the exclusion of disabled learners from education, early-life climate shocks and disability, and the labour-market returns to numeracy. Using a structured search, the review identified 24 core studies. Five foundational studies were added for theoretical grounding. Across the region, there is no homogeneity in the nature of shocks experienced. While parts of East Africa face drought and floods, the Sahel faces extreme heat and unpredictable rainfall patterns. Southern Africa is exposed to El Niño droughts and tropical cyclones. In the settings studied, mathematics appears more sensitive to lost teaching time than reading. Disabled learners already complete school less often and score lower before any shock occurs. One multi-country study finds that temperature shocks in early childhood raise rates of physical, visual and mental impairment. The search, screened by a single reviewer, identified no study that measures how climate disruption affects the ongoing mathematics learning of children with existing disabilities. This indicates a gap in the identified literature, not proof that no such study exists. This gap may conceal a real but unmeasured economic cost, because numeracy earns higher returns than years of schooling alone. The review proposes a four-stage framework, with one conditional preliminary stage, linking climate exposure, disability, lost instruction, and lifetime earnings, and sets out the data needed to estimate the cost.