Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented, disastrous impact on the ability of people to balance work and care for their children and families. This policy brief is an outcome of a collaboration between Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), UNICEF and the International Labour Organization (ILO) in advocating for family-friendly policies to protect and ensure social protection and care systems that are good for children, good for women and good for the economy. The policy brief features an increased focus on the well-being and working conditions of caregivers in the informal economy and their children’s development in low- and middle-income countries. The brief highlights the need to consider sustainable policy and protection responses instead of quick, short-term measures for more gender-transformative and equitable solutions. This represents a critical gap which, if not addressed, will make our goals to tackle child poverty, hunger and gender inequality – and fulfil the SDGs – impossible to achieve. 

Human capital development is a critical determinant of economic growth, equity, and prosperity, but outcomes in this domain are worryingly low inLebanon, risking the future of generations of children. Lebanese children lag behind their peers in human capital development—measured accordingto the World Bank (2020c) Human Capital Index—suggesting that the future productivity of the labor force and the country’s trajectory for equitablegrowth is at risk (World Bank 2020b). The Human Capital Index indicates that children born in Lebanon today will reach, on average, only 52 percentof their potential productivity when they grow up. This is lower than the average estimates for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region(57 percent) and upper-middle-income countries (56 percent). Lebanon’s poor performance on the Human Capital Index is largely attributed to theeducation outcomes calculated for the index.

In the context of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic response, WHO identifies young people as a priority target audience with specific concerns, experiences and behaviours. This policy brief provides relevant insights from behavioural evidence and a set of behavioural considerations for those promoting COVID-19 preventive behaviours among young people. Designers of programmes and initiatives targeting youth may find it helpful to refer to the youth-specific barriers and drivers identified in this policy brief and to prioritize these for testing when planning initiatives targeted at young people.

This policy brief focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of vulnerable girls and young women in India, particularly in relation to the combined pressures of interrupted education, increased domestic work, and widespread stresses on household finances. It analyses the current and potential long-term impact on mental health and well-being, increasing domestic violence and risks of early marriage and parenthood.

Students around the world have lost substantial instructional time owing to abrupt school closures since theoutbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to UNESCO monitoring, in 2020, school buildings werecompletely closed for an average of 15 weeks (4  months) worldwide (UNESCO, 2021a). Counting partialclosures, schools were shut on average for 26 weeks (6.5 months) worldwide, equivalent to almost two-thirds of a typical school year. In response, education systems have deployed remote and hybrid learning modalities to ensure continuity of learning. These efforts have yielded mixed results, with varying degrees of improvement and reduction in inequalities in student learning depending on the modalities and implementation methods of the different education programmes. As a result, almost all students needsome catch-up learning, compelling education systems to deploy and scale up targeted interventions quicklyto help pupils bridge their learning gaps and improve learning.This paper draws key messages to help policy and practice to mitigate the disruptive effects of the COVID-19 crisis on student learning. It addresses the growing concerns of both policy and decision-makers aboutstudents’ disengagement from – or loss of – learning owing to the pandemic, as   reflected in low levels of achievement at   checkpoints compared to expected learning levels, reduced rates of completion and/orgrowing disparities in learners' achievement. If policy-makers do not react quickly by providing additionaland relevant support to address students’ learning needs, especially those from marginalized groups,millions of children and youth may not return to the classroom, and may eventually drop out of school.

 

School closures and learning loss during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic can have a long-term negative impact on the current cohort of school children. Global evidence from past health and disaster-related emergencies show that the impact extends well beyond the period of the disaster or pandemic. It is also likely to affect the children’s economic potential and productivity in adulthood, thus undermining the country’s competitiveness. This policy note analyzes key issues related to the current schooling and learning situation and proposes policy options to prepare for in-person schooling when this is possible. Two nationwide surveys in the Philippines provide a snapshot of the conditions of education in the country: the High Frequency Monitoring (HFM) Household Survey carried out in December 2020 and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Low Income Household Panel and Economic (HOPE) Survey targeting poor and near-poor households carried out in October 2020. The key issues emerging from these data and policy recommendations are summarized in this report.

This study is part of a cross-country series designed to share emerging findings in real time from qualitative interviews with adolescents and school teachers in the context of covid-19. Our sample for this study was purposefully selected from an ongoing baseline GAGE impact evaluation study, and includes two cohorts: younger adolescents (10–14 years) and older adolescents (15–19 years), all of whom are in-school (grades 7 and 8). Adolescent respondents were drawn from both urban and rural schools in Chittagong and Sylhet divisions of Bangladesh. The objectives of the research are as follows: 1) to understand adolescents’ experiences of transition from childhood to adulthood, and to identify differences in their experiences by age, gender, disability and geographic location; 2) to identify adolescents’ knowledge of covid-19, and how the pandemic response has affected adolescent lives. To inform the pandemic response, this study aims to understand adolescents’ knowledge, perceptions and practices during the covid-19 pandemic, their challenges and worries, and the coping mechanisms they are using to deal with the evolving situation.

This policy brief draws on a qualitative study that uses a gender perspective to investigate the notion of resilience among a cohort of young women and young men who grew up in poverty in five rural and urban communities in Ethiopia, and who are part of the broader Young Lives longitudinal study of 3000 children and young people in the country.  It asks why some children seem to fare well as they transistion to adulthood, despite the challenges and obstacles they had faced, whilst others do less well.

This policy brief looks at the impact of COVID-19 on girls’ education in Ethiopia, summarising findings from the Young Lives COVID-19 phone survey (consisting of three calls between June–December 2020) in relation to the Younger Cohort in the study, now aged 19. Our findings also highlight the importance of addressing associated gender issues in relation to increasing levels of domestic work and risks of early marriage, as well as worsening mental health, to avoid the longerterm impacts of a lost year of education.

COVID-19 was at the center of the 2020 United Nations High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF). The pandemic not only forced to move the meeting to virtual but was part of almost every debate. Besides the information provided by the 2020 voluntary national review (VNR) reports on the pandemic and its first impacts on the sustainable development goals (SDGs), the UN system, the private sector, civil society, and academia produced studies of the actual situations and figured out future scenarios.

At least 1.2 million children across Lebanon have had their education disrupted for more than one year, with many having last attended school in October 2019, following protests and civil unrest. This is impacting Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian children alike. With the country slipping deeper into an economic crisis, a safe and systematic school reopening in Lebanon is difficult to imagine. Even before this, children across the country already had lower than average literacy and numeracy rates in the Middle East region. This brief by Save the Children calls for global attention and action on the unfolding education crisis in Lebanon.  It draws from national and global data sources, sectoral recommendations, and the experiences of children in the country.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the longstanding vulnerability of early care and education programs and inequities in the health and financial security of early educators. Addressing new and ongoing needs in the early care and education system (including schools, centers, and homes) is critical to supporting the well-being of children who rely on child care. Prior to March 2020, over 7.75 million children under 6 were cared for in regulated child care programs by one million early educators in center-based programs and one million paid home-based early educators.1 While deemed an essential service, child care programs suffered volatile impacts of the pandemic without the support and existing infrastructure available to other businesses. Policy strategies for recovery and rebuilding must address the short- and long-term needs of child care programs and the early educators who work in them. Attention is needed to address disparities in the experiences of early educators who are Black and Hispanic. Actions to support programs and the workforce can ultimately benefit children and families served in child care.

This note discusses the impact of COVID-19 and related school closures on primary students’ access to learning in Nepal. Its primary source of data is a phone-survey with 1,800 households that have children enrolled in public schools (grades 3-5) collected from November 2020 to February 2021. It describes student learning, parental perception of student levels, access to learning during school closures, and families’ emotional health during COVID-19.

This research is part of the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) programme, a nine-year, mixed methods longitudinal research and evaluation programme following the lives of 20,000 adolescents in six low- and middle-income countries. BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health (BRAC JPGSPH) and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) partnered to carry out rapid-response research in Dhaka to gain an understanding of vulnerable and underprivileged adolescents’ lives during the pandemic. This policy brief presents findings from the second round of data collection which included 30 in-depth interviews with adolescents living in three sites in Dhaka. Findings show inequalities in access to and continuation of distance education, negative effects in psychosocial well-being, unequal access to digital connectivity, financial constraints, with inequalities between different socio-economic classes, gender and age groups, which put them at risk of discontinuing education, entering into child labour and also early marriage.

The increase in malnutrition arising due to the coronavirus pandemic is expected to cause nearly 170,000 additional child deaths in the next two years. Please, read that again, and understand that we are in the middle of a crisis within a crisis. This pandemic has created a fatal cycle: malnourished people are at a higher risk of death or hospitalisation from COVID-19, and the lockdown measures necessary to tackle the virus make it more difficult for people to access healthcare facilities and proper food, thus pushing them closer to malnutrition. Since nutrition underpins all of human flourishing, people in these regions are also under great economic, social, environmental and health strains, and may sink deeper into poverty as a result . Both COVID-19 and malnutrition have intense, long-term impacts, and challenge our ability to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They are emergencies in the short and long term. To avoid this food crisis spiralling out of control, actions to prevent malnutrition must be adopted as an essential part of any COVID-19 response.