COVID-19 and children data hub

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are far-reaching and will be borne by children for years to come. For millions, learning has come to a halt and essential health services like the delivery of life-saving vaccines are out of reach. Others have been plunged into a lifelong cycle of poverty. Using the latest available data, this hub highlights the impacts of the pandemic on children’s poverty, education, health, nutrition and more.

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COVID-19

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Data visualizations & dashboards

How many children and young people have internet access at home?

At the height of nationwide lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, up to 1.6 billion children were affected by school closures, causing the largest mass disruption of education in modern history. To address these gaps, more than 90 per cent of the world’s education ministries have adopted some type of remote learning policy. However, 2.2 billion — or two-thirds of children and young people aged 25 years or less — do not have internet access at home, according to the latest analysis from UNICEF and ITU.

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A Neglected Tragedy: The global burden of stillbirths

A stillbirth occurs every 16 seconds somewhere in the world. This means that every year, about 2 million babies are stillborn – a loss that reaches far beyond the loss of life. It has a traumatic long-lasting impact on women and their families around the world, who often endure profound psychological suffering as well as stigma from their communities, even in high-income countries. Perhaps even more tragically, the majority of these deaths could have been avoided with high-quality care antenatally and during birth.

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Children and the Sustainable Development Goals

Children and the Sustainable Development Goals

We believe that consistent, credible data about children’s situations are critical to the improvement of their lives – and indispensable to realizing the rights of every child.

1 in 4

births of the global population of children under five have never been registered

More than 2 in 3

children are subjected to violent discipline by caregivers

More than 175 million

children do not have access to pre-primary education

3 billion

people do not have a handwashing facility with water and soap at home

5.2 million

children under the age of 5 died in 2019

Latest statistics

What Have We Learnt? Findings from a survey of ministries of education on national responses to COVID-19

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, children’s learning was in crisis with half of 10-year-olds in middle- and low-income countries unable to understand a simple written sentence and more than a quarter billion children out of school. The pandemic has only sharpened these inequities, impacting schoolchildren in poorer countries particularly hard. National governments around the world have been quick to implement remote learning, new health protocols and reopening plans, but these policies have varied widely based on each country’s wealth, according to data from 149 countries from July to October.

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State of the World’s Sanitation

Sanitation is a human right – everyone is entitled to access to sanitation services that provide privacy, and ensure dignity and safety. And yet, the world is alarmingly off-track in delivering sanitation for all by 2030. Despite progress over the past two decades, toilets at home, workplaces, schools and hospitals are still far out-of-reach for billions of people. Achieving universal coverage will be expensive, but inaction threatens to bring even greater costs.

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Progress for Every Child in the SDG Era: The situation in 2020

Five years into our journey, the world is not on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, progress had been uneven and threatened to leave the most vulnerable children behind. This dashboard measures countries’ progress on the 44 child-related SDG indicators using the latest available pre-COVID data.

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Tracking the situation of children during COVID-19

Children around the world have had their lives upended because of actions taken to contain COVID-19. Families are facing heightened stress under lockdown. And children are missing out on life-saving vaccines and much-needed free meals. Given the challenges of traditional data collection efforts during the pandemic, this dashboard offers relevant early indication of impacts on the disruption of essential services, based on quarterly updates from UNICEF country offices.

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