Children and COVID-19 Research Library

There are an estimated 281 million international migrants. One in five is a young person and 36 million are children. Worldwide, more than 4 out of 10 forcibly displaced persons are younger than 18, with 33 million children living in forced displacement at the end of 2019 – either as internally displaced persons within their country or abroad as refugees or asylum seekers. Young migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) across continents represent a unique, untapped pool of talent, ideas, and entrepreneurship. Often resilient, motivated and with experience in overcoming adversity, they have the potential to help solve some of our greatest challenges. Powered by the voices of youth, this report harnesses the technology of U-Report to ask 8,764 young people on the move, aged between 14 and 24, if they felt heard and invited them to share their aspirations to learn and earn. According to this poll, nearly 40 per cent of young people on the move identify education and training as their biggest priorities, and 30 per cent prioritized looking for a job. As the examples in this report highlight, young people on the move are a force for success. But only by creating incentives and opportunities for them to fulfil their aspirations can we turn their passions, energy and hopes into something productive and empowering.

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have gone far beyond the disease itself. In addition to the increasing number of COVID-19 deaths, the pandemic has deepened social and economic inequalities. These indirect impacts have been compounded by pervasive gender inequalities, with profound consequences, especially for women, girls, and people of diverse gender identities. There has been an escalation in gender-based violence within households, increasing numbers of child marriages and female genital mutilation, and an increased burden of unpaid care work, with impacts on mental health. Communities of people affected by HIV are, again, at the crossroads of injustice and targeted discrimination. Measures to control the pandemic have reduced access to essential health and social welfare services, including sexual and reproductive health services, reduced employment and labour force participation, and decimated many household incomes. Here again, women have borne the brunt of marginalisation, particularly those working in the informal sector. Intersectionality analyses have highlighted the inextricable effects of poverty, racial discrimination, harmful gender norms, and limited agency and opportunities for women, especially already marginalised women, even when they represent most of the front-line health workers. The diversion of funds from other health and development programmes into economic recovery means that the pandemic is further eroding health gains made over decades, stalling progress on tackling gender inequalities.

This new report is one of the first in the world to look exclusively at the impact of COVID-19 on adolescents’ lives. It leverages data collected on the social, education, health, and economic effects of COVID-19 on adolescents in June 2020 and again in February 2021, and features contributions and recommendations from girls and boys who are part of advisory groups in Nairobi, Kisumu, Kilifi and Wajir counties, where the data was collected.

Early marriage and its sad consequences to the girl child and socio-economic development of the nation has been an age-long issue being advocated against in many parts of Nigeria. At the onset of COVID-19, the teeming efforts to curb this issue almost got jeopardized with harsh economic situations in many households due to the lockdown and the willingness to marry off their girls to reduce this burden. Closure of schools and cases of sexual gender based violence also impacted the prevalence of early marriage during the pandemic in Nigeria.

The coronavirus-19 pandemic and its secondary effects threaten the continuity of essential health services delivery, which may lead to worsened population health and a protracted public health crisis. We quantify such disruptions, focusing on maternal and child health, in eight sub-Saharan countries. Service volumes are extracted from administrative systems for 63 954 facilities in eight countries: Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Somalia. Using an interrupted time series design and an ordinary least squares regression model with facility-level fixed effects, we analyze data from January 2018 to February 2020 to predict what service utilization levels would have been in March–July 2020 in the absence of the pandemic, accounting for both secular trends and seasonality.

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, child welfare case managers faced contradictions in their responsibility to make regular in-person contact with children and families to promote safety, permanency, and well-being while following public health directives to avoid social contact in order to curb COVID-19 infections. In response, federal guidance was issued regarding the use of technology to maintain mandated contacts with children in foster care. States had to make decisions about how to handle other contact types. This study reviewed documentation of state child welfare agency practices regarding face-to-face contact between case managers and child-welfare involved families between March 2020 and May 2020.

Communities with more Black or Hispanic residents have higher coronavirus rates than communities with more White residents, but relevant community characteristics are underexplored. The purpose of this study was to investigate poverty-, race- and ethnic-based disparities and associated economic, housing, transit, population health and health care characteristics. Six-month cumulative coronavirus incidence and mortality were examined using adjusted negative binomial models among all U.S. counties (n = 3142). County-level independent variables included percentages in poverty and within racial/ethnic groups (Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian), and rates of unemployment, lacking a high school diploma, housing cost burden, single parent households, limited English proficiency, diabetes, obesity, smoking, uninsured, preventable hospitalizations, primary care physicians, hospitals, ICU beds and households that were crowded, in multi-unit buildings or without a vehicle.

This report presents the experiences, voices, challenges and opportunities of Venezuelan refugee and migrant girls and adolescent girls in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, from a feminist, intersectional and human rights perspective. The purpose of this report is to amplify adolescent girls' voices and make visible the risks to the protection of their rights, safety and integrity, as well as their experiences. The report highlights their main needs, opportunities, desires, projects and dreams, with the aim of contributing to the guarantee of their rights in the context of the humanitarian crisis confronting these three countries, as part 
of Plan International’s ‘Girls in Crisis’ global research series.

In April 2020, CARE received a five million dollar grant from MARS to implement a multi-country program, including Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Peru, Thailand, and Venezuela1, with the aim of reducing the negative impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable populations, especially women and girls, using complementary and multimodal approaches. A key activity of this program was the provision of cash and voucher assistance (CVA) to vulnerable populations to meet their diverse basic needs. Program data indicated that CVA was implemented in Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and Thailand.

More than one year into the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic—with some countries seemingly on their way out of the crisis while others enter new waves—evidence of its impact is growing. COVID-19 is increasing short-term humanitarian needs and negatively affecting longer-term outcomes for marginalized populations and people in vulnerable situations, significantly setting back hard-won development gains, magnifying inequalities, and compounding risks. Among those worst affected are the more than 80 million people worldwide—approximately half of whom are women and girls—who have been forcibly displaced by drivers such as persecution, conflict, generalized violence or human rights violations.

What are the hopes, concerns, and expectations of young people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) about their futures and the role of education, social inclusion, and the environment? This UNICEF-ETF joint report brings youth voices, views, and sentiments from the ECA region as a contribution to the regional and global discussions on how to create better lifelong learning systems, more inclusive communities, and greener societies.