Profiles

Using survey data from 103 UNICEF field offices across the world, this paper aims to provide a general overview of the NPA decentralisation phenomenon - where and how it is occurring, the roles of the major actors and the results that have been achieved to date.

The 2022 edition of the Leading Minds for Children and Young People conference “On the Vital Importance of Child Identity”, will be held on 2-4 November in the Salone Brunelleschi of the Istituto degli Innocenti, in Florence, Italy. The Conference is co-hosted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UNICEF Innocenti — Global Office of Research and Foresight. The conference will bring together some of the world’s leading thinkers — scholars, scientists, innovators, influencers, philanthropists, governments and of course young people — to understand the identity challenges that children and young people face. These range from the most traditional forms of identity — such as age, name, nationality, and family relations specified in the opening articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — to 21st century challenges related to mass migration, cyber identity, activist status, and transnationalism, among many other topics.  

What lies ahead for getting COVID under control? WHO’s Special Envoy Dr David Nabarro and the African Union’s Special Envoy Strive Masiyiwa discuss this question on Leading Minds. Both are spearheading global efforts to bridge the growing chasm between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. We will explore the latest on what this all means for tackling new variants as one corner of the world’s population moves on to third jabs while another corner has yet to receive their first.

The pandemic sparked the biggest increase in history in digital learning and living, but what does it mean for this generation of children and the next? Is the future already inevitably written in computer code? What does this mean for the millions of children who simply cannot get online? Are today’s tweens and teens the canaries down the coal mine of this mass human online experiment?Join us in our new Leading Minds Online series* as we put these questions and more to our two experts –  a Japanese-American academic Cultural Anthropologist Dr. Mizuko Ito, Director Connected Learning Lab, University of California, Irvine, and student  Zulaikha Patel, a South African youth activist.

As progress on child labour has stalled and absolute numbers of children engaged in child labour increase, Leading Minds Online asks the experts: How can we get progress back on track and prevent this worst-case scenario?

UNICEF Innocenti’s Leading Minds will ask the high level panel how we keep up the momentum of the vaccine race while leaving no one behind; solutions to simplify complex trade barriers on intellectual property rights and technology transfer; and how can we develop vaccine manufacturing capacity where it is needed most.

Time is fast ticking for a looming debt crisis that threatens to decimate decades of progress for children.The debt crisis is likely to hit two-thirds of the world’s population. Even before the pandemic 1 in 8 countries spent more on debt than on education, health and social spending combined. And African countries are already spending three times more on debt repayments to banks and private lenders than it would cost to vaccinate the entire continent against Covid-19.So how can this ticking time bomb be defused?To coincide with the release of an important policy brief from UNICEF on the debt crisis, Leading Minds will ask the expert panelists:How do we stop mortgaging children’s futures?Can debt relief measures turn this tide?