Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every aspect of society. In mid-April 2020, 192 countries had closed their schools, putting 9 out of 10 enrolled children out of school.

These closures disproportionately affected marginalized children, worsening existing inequities across education systems worldwide.

This brief draws on the experience of five UNICEF education country programmes supported by the Let Us Learn (LUL) initiative, to document tangible lessons in adapting education programmes to support the most marginalized children during school and learning centre closures.

The evidence in this brief stems from a series of semi-structured interviews with Education and Child Protection specialists, as well as a document review of available COVID-19 response studies, in the five LUL-supported UNICEF Country Offices.

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) has disrupted immunization programs around the globe, potentially increasing life‐threatening vaccine‐preventable diseases. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries, which are still struggling to eradicate wild poliovirus. All vaccination campaigns in Pakistan were suspended in April due to the COVID‐19 outbreak, leading 40 million children to miss out on polio vaccination. Like the climate crisis, the COVID‐19 pandemic could be regarded as a child‐rights crisis because it could have life‐threatening impact over children, who need immunization, now and in the long‐term.

The children of Afghanistan, especially those already suffering from poverty and inequity, are among the most vulnerable to the harsh socio-economic impact of COVID-19. Child mortality, malnutrition, forced marriages, sexual abuse, child labour and other forms of violence and exploitation and are all common challenges for the average child. With the addition of COVID-19 and its immediate and secondary impacts, children are now more anxious and worried than ever before and at greater risk of facing physical, sexual and emotional violence, especially as the economic impacts of the crisis set in with poverty rates and hunger in the country rising.

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been declared by the World Health Organisation as an international public health emergency. Owing to its high infectivity, countries all over the world implemented nationwide lockdowns with the hope of flattening the epidemic curve. Around the world, this has led to the closure of schools in over 150 countries affecting the education of nearly 1 billion children. India faced total lockdown from 24th March 2020 to May 2020 and even though a phased re-opening of public services has since then been attempted, most educational institutions including schools and colleges remain closed without a clear view regarding their re-opening. This paper discusses the various psychosocial issues that have emerged leading to academic stress amongst children and adolescent students and its potential to lead to short and long-term psychological morbidity.

Polio is a deadly viral disease that has been paralyzing many children in Afghanistan. Despite fundamental efforts, primarily vaccination, to reduce the number of cases in Afghanistan, there are still many children who are deprived of the vaccine every year. Afghanistan is one of the two remaining countries endemic for polio, and the country has undergone various challenges that have hampered the eradication of this disease. The underlying challenges include inaccessibility of unsecured areas, illiteracy, refusal, and, most recently, COVID-19. The country is in the midst of a battle against COVID-19, and polio has almost entirely been neglected.

Between 20-21 May, Save the Children undertook a remote scoping exercise to assess the sentiments of children aged 6-15 across seven provinces of the country. A total of 74 responses, including 32 boys and 42 girls, were collected via phone calls by Save the Children ’s Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEAL) staff. The questions posed to the children were open-ended, simply asking about what they knew about COVID-19 and how it has impacted their lives and those of their families and communities. This approach was employed in order to better ensure objective responses/reflections from children.