Changes in the work

Changes in the work of stores in the "red zones" of quarantine

This is stated in the new report of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) "Averting a lost decade: urgent action to reverse the devastating impact of COVID-19 on children and youth." The authors point out that the pandemic has undermined decades of progress in addressing childhood issues such as poverty, health, access to education, nutrition, children's rights and psychological well-being.

School feeding programs can get kids back to school
Today, almost two years after the start of the pandemic, its negative effects are snowballing into poverty, inequality and wide-ranging violations of the rights of girls and boys.

“Throughout its history, UNICEF has helped create healthier and safer environments for children around the world, and we have achieved great results for millions of them,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore.

“These achievements can be nullified. The COVID-19 pandemic has become the biggest threat to progress on children's rights in our 75-year history,” added the head of UNICEF.

Today, according to her, the number of children who are hungry and deprived of school is growing rapidly, more boys and girls face violence and live in poverty. Some families force their children into early marriage in order to survive. Recently, the number of children without access to health care, vaccines and adequate nutrition has also increased. All this, according to Henrietta Fore, indicates a rollback.

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There are currently about 60 million more children living in poor families than before the pandemic. In addition, more than 23 million children missed routine vaccinations in 2020, nearly four million more than in 2019, the saddest number in 11 years.

Even before the pandemic, some one billion children around the world were experiencing some form of deprivation: some were unable to learn, others were unable to access health care, were malnourished or homeless.

Now the number of disadvantaged boys and girls is growing rapidly. The gradual recovery that has begun has shown, unfortunately, that there is a widening gap between children from rich and poor families. Children from marginalized and vulnerable segments of the population suffer the most.

The pandemic pushed 100 million children

into “multidimensional poverty” in 2020, up 10 percent from 2019. This means that since mid-March 2020, two more children have been among the poor almost every second. Experts fear that regaining lost ground will not be easy. In their opinion, for a full recovery and return to indicators, including poverty, that existed before COVID-19, it will take, at best, seven to eight years

The main problems caused by the pandemic

• At the peak of the pandemic, more than 1.6 billion students were out of school. In the first year of the crisis around the world, schools were closed for almost 80 percent of schoolchildren.
• More than 13 per cent of adolescents aged 10-19 worldwide suffered from a serious mental disorder. By October 2020, the pandemic had disrupted mental health services in 93 percent of the world's countries.
• The number of working children has grown significantly. There are 160 million of them. By the end of 2022, as a result of the increase in poverty caused by the pandemic, another 9 million children will become victims of exploitation.
• At the peak of the pandemic, 1.8 billion children were living in 104 countries where violence prevention services were disrupted.
• Today, 50 million children suffer from malnutrition, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition. By 2022, this figure could increase by 9 million.

A new UNICEF report says the pandemic is not the only threat to children's health and well-being. Today, 426 million children worldwide - almost one in five children - live in areas of increasingly intense conflict. Their main victims are children. Women and girls are most at risk of sexual violence in conflict settings. Eighty percent of all humanitarian needs in the world are caused by conflicts. In addition, about one billion children - almost half of all children in the world - live in countries that are at "extremely high risk" of the effects of climate change.

“Never before has a child-centred approach been more important than today, in an era of global pandemic, rising conflict and worsening climate change impacts,” said Fore. She stressed that over the next 75 years, children must always come first in decisions to increase investment and last in the list of cuts.