Campaigns & microsites
BIRD Lab: Behavioral Insights Research and Design Laboratory
The BIRD Lab is a virtual space for experimentation and innovation in the application of evidence and methods from the behavioural sciences to achieve UNICEF programme results.
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Places and Spaces: Environments and children's well-being
UNICEF Innocenti's Report Card 17 explores how 43 OECD/EU countries are faring in providing healthy environments for children. Do children have clean water to drink? Do they have good-quality air to breathe? Are their homes free of lead and mould? How many children live in overcrowded homes? How many have access to green play spaces, safe from road traffic? Data show that a nation’s wealth does not guarantee a healthy environment. Far too many children are deprived of a healthy home, irreversibly damaging their current and future well-being. Beyond children’s immediate environments, over-consumption in some of the world’s richest countries is destroying children’s environments globally. This threatens both children worldwide and future generations. To provide all children with safe and healthy environments, governments, policymakers, businesses and all stakeholders are called to act on a set of policy recommendations.
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Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children
New research from UNICEF Innocenti and Western Sydney University explores the question: what does well-being mean to children in a digital age? This first-phase report prioritises the voices of children, collected through workshops with over 300 children from 13 countries along with analysis of existing survey data from 34,000 children aged 9-17 across 30 countries. This report reveals a newly developed well-being framework for children.
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Research and Evidence on Children with Disabilities
UNICEF has a long track record of research and evidence on children with disabilities. Our innovative research at the Office of Research, Innocenti, the Centre of Excellence on Data for Children with Disabilities, and from Region and Country Offices around the world, demonstrate an accomplishment of research and evidence generation spanning decades. This microsite curates research and evidence from the past five years that focus on children with disabilities.
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What Makes Me?
This new UNICEF Innocenti report represents a paradigm shift in early childhood education and development as it explores how ‘core capacities’ – or cornerstones of more familiar concepts such as life skills and competences – develop over the early part of the life course, and how they contribute to children’s well-being and development.
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Best of UNICEF Research 2021
Best of UNICEF Research showcases the most rigorous, innovative and impactful research produced by UNICEF offices worldwide. While evidence highlights emerging issues, it also informs decisions and provides policy and programme recommendations for governments and partners to improve children’s lives. This ninth edition brings together 11 powerful studies from around the world and across the five Strategic Goal Areas.
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Reopening with Resilience
1.6 billion students have been affected by school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although schools have started to reopen in 2020 and 2021, too many have remained closed for too long. Even short disruptions in schooling can have long-lasting impacts on children’s learning and wellbeing.
The evidence is clear that there is no replacement for in-person learning and schools should reopen as soon as possible. This global school closure crisis has highlighted the need for resilient education systems with remote learning options that are accessible and effective for all learners when schools are forced to close.
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UNICEF Innocenti Film Festival 2021
To take stock of the dynamic forces shaping childhood and promote deep reflection on the experiences of children in different contexts, we are proud to announce the second UNICEF Innocenti Film Festival (UIFF) will be held 21 – 24 October 2021.
UIFF will be presented in Florence, Italy through a mixture of live socially distanced screening programmes at Cinema La Compagnia and virtual screenings streamed on demand on MyMovies.it.
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Playing the Game
21 September 2021 Sport, recreation, and play are improving children’s health and wellbeing all around the world. Sport for development (S4D) harnesses the power of sport to help children improve their health and develop social, educational and leadership skills while playing and having fun. On September 21, 2021, UNICEF Innocenti launched phase II of the Sport for Development research to demonstrate how S4D can be used to help children around the world.
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Where do rich countries stand on childcare?
Accessible, affordable, and quality childcare helps parents return to work after parental leave, improves children’s social and cognitive development, and promotes a more gender equitable society. Yet, despite its many benefits, UNICEF Innocenti's report reveals that childcare is inaccessible to many parents in the world's richest countries.
Where Do Rich Countries Stand on Childcare? ranks high-income countries based on their national childcare and parental leave policies. The best-performing countries combine affordability with quality of organized childcare while offering long and well-paid leave to both mothers and fathers.
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Reimagining Migration Responses
In the Horn of Africa, migration has long been a key coping strategy. Recently however, migration has been framed in terms of risk rather than opportunity. UNICEF’s new research captures the experiences of 1,290 migrant children and young people in Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia to help paint a more accurate picture of migration in the region. This will in turn help ensure that they are better protected and supported.
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Social Spending Monitor
Realizing all children’s rights does not come for free. To achieve this indispensable goal, careful planning and budgeting are needed. Experience from past crises shows that social spending works to protect children. UNICEF Innocenti’s new series monitors, advocates for, and supports better social spending.
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Discover the Best of UNICEF Research and Evaluation 2020
(15 December 2020) Evidence and objective assessment are needed more than ever to help enhance the rights and well-being of the world’s children. Researching the changing world around us and evaluating progress are critical to reimagining a better future for children everywhere. In recognition of this, the Best of UNICEF Research and Evaluation 2020 celebrates and showcases innovative and influential research and evaluations from UNICEF offices around the world.
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Time To Teach: Teacher attendance & time on task in Eastern & Southern Africa
(24 November 2020) There is a learning crisis. Fifty-three per cent of children in low- and middle-income countries are in ‘learning poverty’, i.e. they cannot read and understand a simple text by the end of primary school age. In sub-Saharan Africa, the learning poverty rate is 87 per cent overall, and ranges from 40 per cent to as high as 99 per cent in the 21 countries with available data. Teachers attending lessons and spending quality time on task is a critical prerequisite to learning. However, in sub-Saharan Africa, there is evidence that teacher absenteeism ranges from 15 to 45 per cent.
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Worlds of Influence: Understanding what shapes child well-being in rich countries
(3 September 2020) Visit our Innocenti Report Card 16 microsite where we dive deep into the activities, relationships, networks, resources, policies and context that combine to shape child well-being with a focus on 41 'rich' countries of the OECD and the EU. The result is one of the most comprehensives studies on child well-being ever produced and a ranking of the world's rich countries on key outcomes for children in mental well-being, physical health and skills.
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COVID-19 & Children: Rapid Research Response
UNICEF Innocenti is mobilizing a rapid research response in line with UNICEF’s global response to the COVID-19 crisis. The initiatives we’ve begun will provide the broad range of evidence needed to inform our work to scale up rapid assessment, develop urgent mitigating strategies in programming and advocacy, and preparation of interventions to respond to the medium and longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. The research projects cover a rapid review of evidence, education analysis, and social and economic policies.
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Growing up connected
Blanket restrictions on children’s internet use prevent
them from taking advantage of critical learning and skills development
opportunities, according to a new UNICEF report, launched today at the Internet
Governance Forum in Berlin.
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Are the world's richest countries family friendly?
Family-friendly policies matter because they help children to get a better start in life and help parents to find the right balance between their commitments at work and at home. This report focuses on two key policies: childcare leave for parents and early childhood education and care for preschool children.
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Getting into the game
Sport is a powerful tool for involving all children – including the most marginalized and vulnerable – in group activities from an early age (UNHCR, 2013). This report analyses the available evidence on S4D initiatives for children and youth.
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An Unfair Start
In the world’s richest countries, some children do worse at school than others because of circumstances beyond their control, such as where they were born, the language they speak or their parents’ occupations. This report focuses on educational inequalities in 41 of the world’s richest countries.