The Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action 2020 Annual Meeting

(23 July 2020) A new rapid review from UNICEF Innocenti collects and synthesizes the available evidence on the impacts of COVID-19 and previous pandemics, epidemics, and their control measures on child protection and offers key lessons learned for global and national responses to COVID-19 and recommendations for future research priorities.

This paper identifies key ethical considerations when undertaking evidence generation involving children during the mitigation stage of the pandemic (emergency phase), on subject matter relating to COVID-19 once the pandemic has been contained, and once containment policy measures, including lockdowns, have been lifted (post-emergency phase). While the COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly a global crisis, with evidence generation activities raising critical ethical issues that have been captured in the literature and relevant guidelines, there are specificities relating to this emergency that must be considered when unpacking potential ethical issues. Hence while ethical issues pertaining to evidence generation involving children in emergencies and humanitarian contexts are relevant and should be considered, there are factors that define this ‘special case’ that must be considered from the outset. These will inform the core ethical considerations that need to be addressed.

UNICEF is committed to ensuring that all research, evaluation and data collection processes undertaken by UNICEF and its partners are ethical. To this end, procedures and guidelines have been created to embed ethical principles and practices in all our evidence generation programmes. UNICEF recognizes the critical importance of children’s voice in evidence generation and is developing tools to support and advocate for ethical evidence generation involving children.

Our need to understand, quantify, forecast, track and unpack the COVID-19 pandemic fuels an insatiable need for data. We need to ensure that this quickly doesn’t overshadow the basic principle of “do no harm.” We need to do so with a critical lens on our belief that we will do good through the data collection.