News & Commentary

Join educational researcher Nina Alonso for this podcast series as she shares powerful stories from teachers around the world, talking in their own words about their own experiences.

Why do some schools do better than others despite operating under similar – sometimes very difficult – conditions? How can others benefit from their local innovations? To answer these questions, UNICEF has established the Data Must Speak (DMS) Positive Deviance Research programme, which is currently active in 13 countries.

FLORENCE, 9 December 2021 – Empathizing, relaxing and discerning patterns are among nine core capacities essential to children’s success in school, future work and life, according to new report launched today by UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, the Learning for Well-being Foundation, and the Fetzer Institute.

(6 December 2021) The global disruption to education caused by the COVD-19 pandemic is without parallel and the effects on learning are severe. The crisis brought education systems across the world to a halt, with school closures affecting more than 1.6 billion learners. While nearly every country in the world offered remote learning opportunities for students, the quality and reach of such initiatives varied greatly and were at best partial substitutes for in-person learning. Now, 21 months later, schools remain closed for millions of children and youth, and millions more are at risk of never returning to education. Evidence of the detrimental impacts of school closures on children’s learning offer a harrowing reality: learning losses are substantial, with the most marginalized children and youth often disproportionately affected. The State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery charts a path out of the global education crisis and towards building more effective, equitable and resilient education systems.

(7 December 2021) With social and economic inequalities increasing and progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals lagging in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, rigorous research has never mattered more. To underscore the value of high quality research, UNICEF Innocenti showcases the most rigorous, innovative and impactful research produced by UNICEF offices worldwide every year in Best of UNICEF Research (BOUR). Now in its ninth edition, BOUR 2021 features 11 research reports covering a wide range of priorities for children and young people—from child marriage in humanitarian settings in South-East Asia, to HIV viral load suppression in Eastern and Southern Africa, to perceptions of poverty in Ghana.

(20 November 2021 - Florence) The loggia of UNICEF Innocenti joined the world’s most iconic landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower, Petra, the bridge at Victoria Falls, and Chichen Itza, in 'going blue' to mark World Children’s Day.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw students around the world struggle as schools shut down and home school was hindered by slow or—in many places—nonexistent Internet service. The Learning Passport’s solution: give students app- or browser-based classes that do not require a consistent web connection. Instead, students access the platform when they can, downloading their lessons to complete later, offline. Developed jointly by UNICEF and Microsoft, the Learning Passport allows educators to upload local curricula—meaning it works across multiple languages, subjects and age groups. First deployed in Timor-Leste in 2020, the Learning Passport now has some 1.6 million users in 13 countries.

(Florence, 26 October 2021) Nine films about childhood have won the Iris award at the UNICEF Innocenti Film Festival 2021 (UIFF). The festival, which is organized by UNICEF Innocenti, showcases international film narratives of childhood. Taking place 21-24 October in Florence, Italy, the festival featured 38 films from 29 countries.

Building on the first report in a series on child and adolescent mental health and timed with the launch of UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2021: On My Mind: Promoting, protecting, and caring for children’s mental health, a new report released for World Mental Health Day in 2021 looks at how the early stages of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 affected the mental health of children and adolescents.

Prague/Florence, 30 September 2021 - As many as 35,000 children may be forced into life in poverty due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This figure is based on the estimates from the UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti, the results of which were presented today by the Czech Committee of UNICEF.

7 September 2021 - New research out today addresses what family-friendly policies look like in the South Asian context, where female labor force participation is very low and more than 90 per cent of workers are in the informal sector or under informal employment. Done in support and collaboration with UNICEF’s regional office in South Asia, UNICEF Innocenti’s new working paper considers how family-friendly policies can be responsive to the particular characteristics and circumstances of countries in the region – including multi-generation families, family units built around adolescent mothers (and sometimes fathers), and migration for work both within and outside countries. The research also tackles the question of how family-friendly policies might need to evolve in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. The associated advocacy brief: Reaching more families, benefiting more children and package of country reports identifies gaps and opportunities for family friendly policies in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

A new report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) provides a global overview of progress made around the world over the past decade in extending social protection and building rights-based social protection systems, in the context of COVID-19, and with input from UNICEF Innocenti on social protection gaps and opportunities for children.