1.6 billion students have been affected by school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although schools have started to reopen in 2020 and 2021, too many have remained closed for too long. Even short disruptions in schooling can have long-lasting impacts on children’s learning and wellbeing. The evidence is clear that there is no replacement for in-person learning and schools should reopen as soon as possible. This global school closure crisis has highlighted the need for resilient education systems with remote learning options that are accessible and effective for all learners when schools are forced to close.

(Florence, 26 October 2021) Nine films about childhood have won the Iris award at the UNICEF Innocenti Film Festival 2021 (UIFF). The festival, which is organized by the UNICEFs Office of Research – Innocenti, showcases international film narratives of childhood. Taking place 21-24 October in Florence (Italy), the festival featured 38 films from 29 countries from a total of 1,700 submissions from 114 countries.

UNICEF turns 75 this year. To celebrate its resolute commitment to children – and as we launch the second UNICEF Innocenti Film Festival showcasing new, high-quality cinema narratives of childhood – we look back to some of the greatest film narratives of childhood.

(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.

(7 December 2021) With social and economic inequalities increasing and progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals lagging in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, rigorous research has never mattered more. To underscore the value of high quality research, UNICEF Innocenti showcases the most rigorous, innovative and impactful research produced by UNICEF offices worldwide every year in Best of UNICEF Research (BOUR). Now in its ninth edition, BOUR 2021 features 11 research reports covering a wide range of priorities for children and young people—from child marriage in humanitarian settings in South-East Asia, to HIV viral load suppression in Eastern and Southern Africa, to perceptions of poverty in Ghana.

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.

Despite the identification of cash transfers as a promising evidence-informed strategy to address violence against children and violence against women – until recently, there was little evidence from low- and middle-income country settings, that assessed the effects of such interventions on both in the same study. In this blog, we summarize five studies completed in the last two years that examine impacts of cash, cash-for-work and cash plus programmes on both violent discipline of children and male intimate partner violence against women (IPV) from diverse LMICs – Bangladesh, Colombia, Mali, the Philippines and Rwanda. 

UNICEF Innocenti is mobilizing a rapid research response in line with UNICEF’s global response to the COVID-19 crisis. The initiatives we’ve begun will provide the broad range of evidence needed to inform our work to scale up rapid assessment, develop urgent mitigating strategies in programming and advocacy, and preparation of interventions to respond to the medium and longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. The research projects cover a rapid review of evidence, education analysis, and social and economic policies.