Children and COVID-19 Research Library

Household food insecurity, an inability to provide adequate nutrition for a healthy, active lifestyle, affects nearly 1 in 7 households with children in the United States. Though rates of food insecurity declined to pre-recession levels just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, they are now once again increasing. As a result, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, millions of young children continue to grow up in households that struggle daily with a problem that is often associated with the developing world. The result is both immediate and long- term health and development deficits for children.

Since the Every Woman Every Child movement was launched 10 years ago, there has been remarkable progress in improving the health of the world’s women, children, and adolescents, including reducing maternal and child mortality and improving child nutrition and education. However, conflict, climate instability, and the COVID-19 pandemic are putting all children and adolescents at risk . In particular, the COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating inequities, with reported disruptions in essential health interventions disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable women and children.
This report notes that the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear how fundamental good data are across sectors; that greater investments are needed to build resilient systems to provide high-quality and integrated services consistently; and COVID-19 recovery efforts  require multilateral action and continued investment in development.

With the global emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, digital development has become an integral component of UNICEF’s work as national programmes shifted to distance and remote delivery means.

This report highlights examples of country-level COVID-19 response initiatives employing digital innovation and T4D approaches, in support of both its humanitarian action and development programmes. It further demonstrates how the scale-up of T4D’s strategic integration in programming and digital innovations has allowed UNICEF to support programme partners in closing gaps to meet children’s needs, often under complex environments, and in line with existing national systems. These initiatives span UNICEF programmes worldwide and help address children’s health, nutrition, education, protection, access to water, sanitation and hygiene, and inclusion. 

There have been dramatic reductions in child and youth mortality over the last 29 years. Globally, under-five mortality has dropped by 59% since 1990—from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births then to 38 deaths in 2019. Initial evidence suggests that the impact of COVID-19 on direct mortality for children and youth may be small, but indirect effects can be severe. Many life-saving services have already been disrupted by COVID-19. 

The progress in reducing child mortality around the world has been remarkable. Under-five mortality rates have declined by almost 60 per cent since 1990, and as a result millions more children survive to adolescence today than they did three decades ago. The impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, however, threatens years of improvement in child and adolescent survival through the interruption of essential health services. Even before the coronavirus captured the world’s attention, it was clear that if survival targets were to be met, resources and policy would need to be geared towards accelerating progress and not just maintaining it.

In Kenya, millions of children have limited access to nurturing care. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it is anticipated that vulnerable children will bear the biggest brunt of the direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic. This review aimed to deepen understanding of the effects of COVID-19 on nurturing care from conception to four years of age, a period where the care of children is often delivered through caregivers or other informal platforms.

This article focuses on the impact of COVID- 19 on food security and nutrition among children in India. India is already one of the highest ranking countries in the world for the number of children suffering from malnutrition and more than one third of the world's malnourished children live in India. The novel coronavirus risks is undermining the efforts of humanitarian and food security organizations to reduce hunger and scale down the efforts in this direction In this paper, I would largely focus on the impact of COVID- 19 on food security and nutrition among children in India.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the World Food Programme (WFP) are warning that severe underfunding, conflict and disasters – as well as supply chain challenges, rising food prices and loss of income due to COVID19 - threaten to leave millions of refugees across Africa without food.

Across several social, economic, and political dimensions, women and girls are disproportionately affected by the crisis simply because of their sex. The immediate effects of COVID-19 on gender inequality are already showing themselves in health and education, on the burden of unpaid care work and gender-based violence.
While the COVID-19 crisis affects everyone, women and girls face specific and often disproportionate economic, health, and social risks due to deeply entrenched inequalities, social norms, and unequal power relations. Understanding the gender-differentiated impacts of the COVID-19 crisis through sex-disaggregated data is fundamental to designing policy responses that reduce vulnerable conditions and strengthen women's agency, placing gender equality at their centre. This is not just about rectifying long-standing inequalities but also about building a more just and resilient world.

This paper discusses the implications of lockdown-induced school and rural child-care center closures on education and health outcomes for the urban and rural poor. It focuses on food and nutritional security of children who depend on school feeding and supplementary nutrition programs. Authors argue that the impacts are likely to be much more severe for girls as well as for children from already disadvantaged ethnic and caste groups. They also discuss ways in which existing social security programs can be leveraged and strengthened to ameliorate these impacts.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in more than 11·6 million cases of COVID-19 and 538 000 deaths as of July 7, 2020.

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has already led to major increases in unemployment and is expected to lead to unprecedented increases in poverty and food and nutrition insecurity, as well as poor health outcomes. Families where young children, youth, pregnant and lactating women live need to be protected against the ongoing protracted pandemic and the aftershocks that are very likely to follow for years to come. The future wellbeing of the vast majority of the world now depends on reconfiguring the current ineffective food, nutrition, health, and social protection systems to ensure food and nutrition security for all. Because food, nutrition, health, and socio-economic outcomes are intimately inter-linked, it is essential that we find out how to effectively address the need to reconfigure and to provide better intersecoral coordination among global and local food, health care, and social protection systems taking equity and sutainability principles into account. Implementation science research informed by complex adaptive sytems frameworks will be needed to fill in the major knowledge gaps. Not doing so will not only put the development of individuals at further risk, but also negatively impact on the development potential of entire nations and ultimately our planet.

Millions of children in Yemen could be pushed to ‘the brink of starvation’ due to huge shortfalls in humanitarian aid funding amid the COVID-19 pandemic – according to a new UNICEF report marking more than five years since conflict escalated in the country. Yemen five years on: Children, conflict and COVID-19 warns that as Yemen’s devastated health system and infrastructure struggle to cope with coronavirus, the already dire situation for children is likely to deteriorate considerably.

The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented with the virus spreading in almost all countries in the world. In Africa, 55 out of 54 countries have reported at least one COVID-19 infection. Luckily for Africa, confirmed COVID-19 cases remain comparatively low, at 158,000 as of June 3rd; which is partly attributable to early and decisive action taken by many African governments as well as a youthful population. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit Africa not only as a health crisis but also as a devastating socio-economic crisis that may persist over the months and years to come. This policy paper underscores that, although children do not represent a high-risk group for direct COVID-19 fatality, the pandemic posts far-reaching secondary impacts that heighten risks to African children’s rights and wellbeing.