UNICEF DATA - Child Statistics

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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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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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. While all regions have improved their data coverage of child-related SDG indicators since 2018, a staggering 442 million children live in countries where the SDGs remain out of reach.

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

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Protect the progress: Every Woman Every Child report 2020

The past decade has largely been a time of progress for many women, children and adolescents around the world. Under-five deaths reached an all-time recorded low in 2019, and more than a billion children were vaccinated in the last 10 years. Yet, progress has been uneven and fragile, with global factors such as conflict, the climate crisis and COVID-19 threatening to reverse it.

Publications

COVID-19: Are children able to continue learning during school closures?

As COVID-19 shuttered schools around the world, approximately 1.5 billion children were affected. Governments have responded by enacting remote learning policies, but at least 1 in 3 school children – 463 million children worldwide – are not able to participate in remote learning, effectively cutting them off from education and jeopardizing their futures.

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Levels and Trends in Child Mortality

The progress in reducing child mortality around the world has been remarkable. Under-five mortality rates have declined by almost 60 per cent since 1990, and as a result millions more children survive to adolescence today than they did three decades ago. The impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, however, threatens years of improvement in child and adolescent survival through the interruption of essential health services.

Progress on drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in schools: Special focus on COVID-19

The latest global estimates found that in the 60 countries identified as having the highest risk of health and humanitarian crisis due to COVID-19, 1 in 2 schools lacked basic water and sanitation services and 3 in 4 lacked basic handwashing services at the start of the pandemic. Accelerating progress in countries with the lowest coverage of WASH in schools will therefore be critical to improving school safety during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

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Tracking the situation of children during COVID-19

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