Children and COVID-19 Research Library

This review aims to look into the consequences of (1) the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to mitigate the spread of the pandemic and (2) the policies and programmatic responses to mitigate socio-economic consequences of the pandemic and how they have potentially interacted with child labour drivers, especially in agrifood systems. Thus, this review aims to document and spell out how policy and programmatic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular social protection measures, have the potential to prevent or contain an increase of child labour in agriculture at large.

Child labor violates the children’s fundamental rights and interrupts their intellectual growth and potential. The prevalence of child labor in Ecuador has increased significantly in recent years, and the COVID-19 health crisis has only aided it. The province of Chimborazo over time has taken the lead amongst the other Ecuadorian provinces, showing a significant increase in the rate of child labor which has now become too complex to solve. Although, as a result of COVID-19, the rate of child labor has increased worldwide, the national and provincial rate of child labor in Ecuador significantly reduced due to the social distancing policies. However, once the infections were controlled, it resumed the pre-pandemic situation as many children from low-income families were forced to seek alternative income to survive during the pandemic; likewise, all commercial, production, and service activities were affected.

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Subsequently, governments worldwide implemented strict regimes of lockdowns and school closures to contain the transmission of the virus. Ghana's government on 15 March 2020 also announced a lockdown and closure of schools, lasting up till January 2021. Against this backdrop, the paper examined the implications of school closures on child labour in Ghana. Qualitative data for the study were collected between October 2020 to February 2021 in a small rural community in northern Ghana.

Since working children have limited access to testing and monitoring for COVID-19, this study decided to measure SARS-CoV-2 prevalence among them and compare it to non-working children. Its objective is to compare the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 genome and anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody among working and non-working children. Volunteer child labor studying at Defense of Child Labor and Street Children and randomly selected 5–18-year-old (same range as child labor group) unemployed children participated in this study. The groups, respectively, had 65 and 137 members. This is an analytical cross-sectional study that surveys molecular prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection by RT-PCR, and seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibody by ELISA in working and non-working children.

COVID-19 poses a grave threat to the world’s children. As it has been showed in a previous report, while the mortality rate for healthy children infected by the virus has been lower than for adults and those with pre-existing conditions, 30 million are still at risk of illness and death. It is the indirect effects and impacts of this disease that pose a clear and present danger to children, particularly the most vulnerable. This report looks at one those impacts of COVID-19 on girls and boys. Violence. It predicts a major spike in the cases of children experiencing physical, emotional and sexual violence, both now and in the months and years to come. Whether they are forced to stay at home, or, in time, are sent to work or pushed into early marriage, boys and girls face a bleak future – unless governments, UN agencies, donors, NGOs, and the private sector do everything thing they can now to protect them.