Report Card 17 explores how 43 OECD/EU countries are faring in providing healthy environments for children. Do children have clean water to drink? Do they have good-quality air to breathe? Are their homes free of lead and mould? How many children live in overcrowded homes? How many have access to green play spaces, safe from road traffic? Data show that a nation’s wealth does not guarantee a healthy environment. Far too many children are deprived of a healthy home, irreversibly damaging their current and future well-being. Beyond children’s immediate environments, over-consumption in some of the world’s richest countries is destroying children’s environments globally. This threatens both children worldwide and future generations. To provide all children with safe and healthy environments, governments, policymakers, businesses and all stakeholders are called to act on a set of policy recommendations.

The UNICEF Innocenti Annual Report 2021 highlights the key results achieved in research and evidence to inform policymaking and programming.

UNICEF has a long track record of research and evidence on children with disabilities. Our innovative research at the Office of Research, Innocenti, the Centre of Excellence on Data for Children with Disabilities, and from Region and Country Offices around the world, demonstrate an accomplishment of research and evidence generation spanning decades. This microsite curates research and evidence from the past five years that focus on children with disabilities.

This new UNICEF Innocenti report represents a paradigm shift in early childhood education and development as it explores how ‘core capacities’ – or cornerstones of more familiar concepts such as life skills and competences – develop over the early part of the life course, and how they contribute to children’s well-being and development.

New research from UNICEF Innocenti and Western Sydney University explores the question: what does well-being mean to children in a digital age? This first-phase report prioritises the voices of children, collected through workshops with over 300 children from 13 countries along with analysis of existing survey data from 34,000 children aged 9-17 across 30 countries. This report reveals a newly developed well-being framework for children.

(27 July 2021, FLORENCE) From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about its impact on the mental health of children and young people were widespread. While the evidence is still emerging, there are many signs it could be severe and widespread. Faced with a potential “pandemic within a pandemic”, evidence-informed responses are urgently needed to support mental health. A new report by UNICEF Innocenti, ‘Mind Matters: Lessons from past crises for child and adolescent mental health during COVID-19’, reviews the impact of past crises (such as natural disasters and the HIV epidemic) on youth mental health with the aim of informing responses to the current crisis.

Digital learning has the potential to offer interactive and personalized learning for children, in and out of school, including the most marginalized. However, depending on programme design, delivery, and use, digital learning can also exacerbate learning inequalities. This report presents tangible findings on the implementation and use of digital learning to improve outcomes for marginalized children in Lebanon. This report focuses on the UNICEF-Akelius Foundation Partnership and its implementation of a digital course used on tablets and mobile phones for language learning of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. The report provides findings across three areas: First, the report investigates the digital course’s use in a blended learning environment where it was used on tablets by students as part of traditional face-to-face classroom instruction with teachers. Second, the analysis examines the transition to remote learning where the course was used on devices owned by the household, supported by teachers remotely. Third, the report estimates the effectiveness of the use of the digital course during this period of remote learning from August–November 2020 showing positive results for language and art competencies.

Building on the first report in a series on child and adolescent mental health and timed with the launch of UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2021: On My Mind: Promoting, protecting, and caring for children’s mental health, a new report released for World Mental Health Day in 2021 looks at how the early stages of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 affected the mental health of children and adolescents.