THE COVID-19 pandemic has had a far-reaching impact on students everywhere, perhaps nowhere more than the continent of Africa where a majority of children have no internet to make up for closed classrooms.
In a new conversation with CTV National News’ London Bureau Chief Paul Workman, Graça Machel, the award-winning humanitarian and widow of South African president Nelson Mandela, spoke about barriers to education and empowerment in Africa and how the pandemic may have exacerbated the situation.
“The whole year of 2020 — for hundreds of millions of African children — was simply lost,” she said.
The continent that had initially appeared relatively spared from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic has now seen the appearance of a more volatile variant of the coronavirus, resulting in more than three million recorded infections and widespread school closures.
For some African children, lessons moved online like much of the world. But for
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