Children and COVID-19 Research Library

At this critical time, it is vital that international governments and donors increase funding to enable children in Uganda to continue learning. The closure of 51,000 institutions to prevent COVID-19 has left 15 million children out of school and facing increased risk of violence, exploitation and abuse. Closing schools must not mean suspending learning. There are evidenced home, community and media-based methods to ensure that children can keep learning and safe. Funding is urgently needed to ensure that these are in place from the start of the response before the opportunity closes.

This report is for humanitarians working in fragile contexts that are likely to be affected by the COVID-19 crisis. It is organised around broad themes and areas of focus of particular importance to those whose programming advances gender equality and reduces gender inequalities. It seeks to deepen the current gender analysis available by encompassing learning from global gender data available for the COVID-19 public health emergency.

This rapid review focusses on efforts to mitigate the educational impact of previous disease outbreaks, concentrating on school-age learners. It follows two companion papers that reviewed broader secondary effects and attempts to mitigate them (Rohwerder, 2020; Kelly, 2020). It aims to inform the education sector’s responses to the COVID-19 crisis, although there are important differences between previous disease outbreaks and the COVID-19 situation.

The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) systematically collects information on several different common policy responses that governments have taken to respond to the pandemic on 18 indicators such as school closures and travel restrictions. It now has data from more than 180 countries.

Disease outbreaks affect women and men differently, and pandemics make existing inequalities for women and girls and discrimination of other marginalized groups such as persons with disabilities and those in extreme poverty, worse. This needs to be considered, given the different impacts surrounding detection and access to treatment for women and men. Women represent 70 percent of the health and social sector workforce globally and special attention should be given to how their work environment may expose them to discrimination, as well as thinking about their sexual and reproductive health and psychosocial needs as frontline health workers.

Women, the elderly, adolescents, youth, and children, persons with disabilities, indigenous populations, refugees, migrants, and minorities experience the highest degree of socioeconomic marginalization. Marginalized people become even more vulnerable in emergencies. This is due to factors such as their lack of access to effective surveillance and early-warning systems, and health services. The COVID-19 outbreak is predicted to have significant impacts on various sectors.

As UNHCR prepares to respond to a potential outbreak of COVID 19 in refugee, internally displaced persons (IDP) settings, the Evaluation Service offered to do a quick extraction of key findings and recommendations emerging from independent assessments of similar responses – with specific reference to Ebola (other outbreaks may also be relevant but are beyond the scope of this first review).

There is a marked lack of research on the implications of public health emergencies on different groups, especially women and girls. Less than 1 percent of published research papers on the 2014–16 West Africa Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak and the 2016 Zika outbreak focused on the gender dimensions of the emergencies. Research on the gender implications of previous health emergencies is even more scarce. CARE’s analysis shows that COVID-19 outbreaks in development or humanitarian contexts could disproportionately affect women and girls in a number of ways, including adverse effects on their education, food security and nutrition, health, livelihoods, and protection. Even after the outbreak has been contained, women and girls may continue to suffer from ill-effects for years to come.

This brief is meant to provide information specific to infant and young child feeding (IYCF)in the context of COVID-19. This Brief does not cover wider mitigation and response measures available in other guidance. As a nutrition community, we will continue to develop our understanding on practical solutions to deliver programming in the context of COVID-19. Documenting and disseminating these lessons and emerging evidence will be key to implementing the most appropriate and effective responses in the face of this pandemic.

Little research attention has been paid to documenting and analyzing attempts of education systems moving quickly and at scale to provide online learning when all or many schools are closed. Related 'good practices' are considered rare, and on the whole, activities and initiatives of these sorts are poorly documented, especially when it comes to the needs of learners and education systems across the so-called 'developing world'. That said, it is possible to extrapolate from the existing knowledgebase about the use of educational technologies in general over past decades, as well as from consensus expert and practitioner wisdom and experience, to offer high-level guidance and 'rules of thumb' for policymakers forced to make related decisions in fast moving, very challenging circumstances with little guidance or relevant experience.

Strict interventions were successful to control the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in China. As transmission intensifies in other countries, the interplay between age, contact patterns, social distancing, susceptibility to infection and disease, and COVID-19 dynamics remains unclear. To answer these questions, we analyze contact surveys data for Wuhan and Shanghai before and during the outbreak and contact tracing information from Hunan Province. Daily contacts were reduced 7-9 fold during the COVID-19 social distancing period, with most interactions restricted to the household. Children 0-14 years were 59% (95% CI 7-82%) less susceptible than individuals 65 years and over. A transmission model calibrated against these data indicates that social distancing alone, as implemented in China during the outbreak, is sufficient to control COVID-19. While proactive school closures cannot interrupt transmission on their own, they reduce peak incidence by half and delay the epidemic. These findings can help guide global intervention policies.

As COVID-19 is declared a pandemic and several countries declare nationwide school closures, these measures are affecting hundreds of millions of children.1More countries are entering delay and mitigation phases of pandemic control, with an urgent need for proactive and multifaceted responses addressing children's social, economic, and health needs to avoid widening disparities and honour commitments to the UN Convention on Child Rights and Sustainable Development Goals.

This report from the VAWG Helpdesk explores the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic may impact on violence against women and girls, based on emerging evidence, including increased risk of corporal punishment, sexual exploitation, and abuse of girls, as well as intensification of child protection issues due to children being separated from caregivers.

WHO, UNICEF, the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, the United States Agency for International Development USAID, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Parenting for Lifelong Health, and the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund Accelerating Achievement for Africa's Adolescents Hub are collaborating to provide openaccess online parenting resources during COVID-19.
These resources focus on concrete tips to build positive relationships, divert and manage bad behaviour, and manage parenting stress. They are shared through social media, and they are accessible on non-smartphones through the Internet of Good Things. A team of international volunteers are producing translations in 55 languages. Importantly, these parenting resources are based on robust evidence from randomised controlled trials in low-income and middle-income countries.
Find out more here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30736-4/fulltext#coronavirus-linkback-header

In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, the Chinese Government has ordered a nationwide school closure as an emergency measure to prevent spreading of the infection. Public activities are discouraged. The Ministry of Education estimates that more than 220 million children and adolescents are confined to their homes; this includes 180 million primary and secondary students and 47 million preschool children). Thanks to the strong administrative system in China, the emergency home schooling plan has been rigorously implemented. Massive efforts are being made by schools and teachers at all levels to create online courses and deliver them through TV broadcasts and the internet in record time. The new virtual semester has just started in many parts of the country, and various courses are offered online in a well organised manner. These actions are helping to alleviate many parents' concerns about their children's educational attainment by ensuring that school learning is largely undisrupted.