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	School children are bearing the brunt of the global hunger crisis – just feed them by Kevin Watkins LSE, Oxfam from Poverty to Power   Governments will this week gather in Rome for a UN event with one of those titles designed to induce profound boredom. The FAO is marking the second anniversary of the 2021 World Food System Summit with a ‘Stocktaking Moment’. Yes, I know, those two words feel like a good enough reason to stop reading right now, but bear with me.   As the saying goes, ‘we are what we eat’. And our food systems – the way we produce, market, and consume food – are making our world undernourished, unhealthy and unsustainable.   The report card tells its own story. Over 735 million people are now living with hunger. On current trends, malnutrition levels in 2030, the international target date for ‘zero hunger’, will be the same as they were in 2015, when the target was adopted.   Intensive agriculture is raising farm yields but wreaking environmental havoc, fuelling biodiversity loss, and contributing one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions driving us to climate catastrophe.   Then there’s humanity’s weight problem. As the world converges on the high-fat, ultra-processed diets marketed by an increasingly reckless global food industry, an epidemic of poor diets, obesity and overweight now kills one-in-five- adults – more than tobacco.   This is not a time for ‘taking stock’ at soporific inter-governmental gatherings. It’s a time for change. The UN’s Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed has called for ‘urgent action at scale’. The danger is that the Rome event, much like the Food System Summit itself, will turn into a talk shop that delivers (yet another) communique that is long on principles but short on bold, practical initiatives.   One way to avoid that outcome would be to take an old policy idea and make it a new force for the transformation of food systems: the provision of school meals.   Children are the hidden victims of our food system failures. Take the case of under-nutrition. The international monitoring of child nutrition focuses overwhelmingly on the under-5 age group and the crucial ‘first 1000 days’ of life. But what about the rest of childhood, the crucial growth spurts that happen during adolescence, and the transition to adulthood – a period Don Bundy, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, describes as the critical ‘8000 days'.   In a background paper prepared for the ‘Stocktake’, we provide new estimates for under-nutrition among school age children. Applying regional malnutrition rates to UN age-cohort data, some 284 million children of primary and secondary school age are going hungry. Around half live in Africa, a share that is rising rapidly, but progress has stalled in South Asia and is in reverse gear in Latin America. No region is immune.   It’s not just the poorest countries that are affected. As the cost-of-living crisis intensifies across Europe, in the UK, the Food Foundation found that a quarter of households were affected by food insecurity in late 2022 – three times the level pre-pandemic level. Some 4 million children were living in those households.   It doesn’t take a UN summit to work out the consequences of undernutrition for education. Just ask any parent or teacher. Hunger and learning are not good bedfellows. Moreover, the poverty behind poor nutrition puts children – especially adolescent girls – at risk of being pulled out of school and into labour markets.   Sadly, the siloes separating ‘health policy’ from ‘education policy’ have stymied an effective response to the problem, but history offers important lessons and some cause for hope.   The late-19th Century British social reformer Margaret Macmillan saw school meals as a great unifier with the potential to cut across political divides. Her campaign culminated in legislation adopted in 1906 allowing public funds to be used to provide for children “unable by reason of lack of food to take full advantage of the education provided to them.”   If you want a vehicle for reaching under-nourished children and unlocking lost learning potential, school meals are a good bet. One big advantage is that they already exist.   They are among the world’s most extensive safety nets – and safety nets can be rapidly expanded. School meal programmes have a proven track record not just in delivering decent food and improving school attendance, but in improving learning outcomes. Ghana’s school feeding programme raised learning levels with the poorest children registering the biggest gains.   The gains can cross generational boundaries. In India, home to the world’s largest school meals scheme, the children of mothers who received meals are less likely to be stunted and more likely to have better health.   Well-designed school meal programmes are also part of the policy toolkit for tackling the public-health problems associated with food system failures.   Children are also on the front-line of the global obesity crisis. One-in-three of Latin America’s children are now overweight or obese. Numbers are also rising in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. These children face elevated prospects of obesity in adulthood, along with the associated health risks.   School canteens may not be an obvious battleground in the battle for healthier diets – but that’s what they are. Providing children with tasty, healthy, and nutritious foods at school can help cultivate consumption preferences for low-far, low-sodium foods, including fresh fruit and vegetables.   And changing adolescent diets today is one way of changing the food markets of the future. That’s why countries across Latin America are following the examples of Finland, France, and others who have made school meals an integral part of public health policy.   Of course, school meals are not a stand-alone strategy. Multinational food corporations like to pitch up at UN summits and express their undying commitment to public health and all things SDG. But their formidable advertising and marketing capabilities are directed towards hooking children on products that will harm their health, notably high-fat, ultra-processed food.   That’s why school meals need to be part of a wider response – including taxes on sugars, tighter labelling laws, and restrictions on advertising – that put public health before corporate profit.   While school meal provision may represent a financial drop in a multi-trillion-dollar food market ocean, it provides a powerful tool for change. Governments and municipal authorities can use the power of procurement to signal public policy priorities.   In Brazil, where every child in a public school receives a free meal, one-third of the budget is reserved for smallholder farmers. Municipalities like Sao Paolo – the largest in the country – is gearing school meal procurement towards low-carbon, regenerative agriculture. If you’re looking for an inspiring vision for the food system of the future, and a case study in effective advocacy, check out the web-site of Brazil’s Comida do Amanha Institute.   What is happening in Brazil is part of a wider story. Across the world, school meal programmes are nudging their way into the mainstream of public policy reforms linking food justice to public health, and climate justice.   You can see that nudge in the EU’s Farm-to-Fork strategy and the Biden Administration’s American Families Plan. You can see it in the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, an agreement linking over 100 municipalities working to reshape food systems. You can see it in the way that campaigning and advocacy organisations make common cause on food system reform. And you can read about it in the brilliant work of Jess Fanzo, now at the Columbia Climate School, who has done an intellectual demolition job on the siloed thinking that has hampered food system reform.   The problem is that the school feeding safety net is weakest where it needs to be strongest – namely in the countries and communities hit hardest by rising malnutrition.   Fewer than one-in-five children in the world’s poorest countries currently have access. In Africa, where under a quarter of children are covered, the combination of double-digit food price inflation, rising debt, and shrinking tax revenues threatens to erode already inadequate provision.   The ’Stocktake Moment’ is an opportunity to put school meals at the centre of a bold and practical agenda for transforming food systems. Countries at the sharp end of the nutrition crisis should be a first order priority.   Momentum is already building. The new Kenyan government has set out plans for universal provision by 2030. Rwanda, one of the world’s poorest countries, is already nearing that target. Countries like Bangladesh and Nepal have also set ambitious goals. The impetus for change, along with the bulk of the financing, has come not from aid donors, but from developing country governments gathered in the global School Meals Coalition.   What would it take to build on these and many other initiatives to build a global force for change? Apart from political leadership, the answer to that question is more finance.   Research carried out for the School Meals Consortium estimates that it would take around $5.8bn a year to reach an additional 73 million of the world’s poorest children. Around $1.7-2bn would need to come from aid for the poorest countries; the rest from governments.   As the fiscal space available to governments shrinks, that may look like a tall order – but it is within reach. Increased taxes are never popular, but linked directly to a cause enjoying widespread public support they can be more palatable.   India uses earmarked taxes to fund its school meal programmes. In Bolivia a universal school meals programme is financed by a small tax on hydrocarbon exports. Countries like Senegal, Tanzania, and Mozambique with the prospect of recent gains from natural gas exports could follow that example.   International cooperation could also play a critical role. Current levels of aid for school meals are desperately low – typically around $220m, or less than 1 per cent of overall aid flows – and poorly coordinated.   As the EU, the US and other aid donor countries commit to expanding school meal programmes the Rome ‘Stocktake’ is their opportunity. Financing the School Meals Coalition plan would cost will cost less than the $2bn a day now directed to their farm subsidies.   Innovative approaches to debt relief offer another avenue. With over 20 countries in Africa either in or at risk of debt distress, repayments to creditors are crowding out vital public spending.   ‘Debt-for-school-meal swaps’, modelled on approaches that are now commonplace for environmental investments, could convert unpayable debts into alleviating hunger and unlocking learning opportunities for millions of children.   Transforming food systems is a complex undertaking. This is a territory marked by powerful vested interests, partisan politics, and divided opinion. By contrast, tackling hunger among school children cuts across political divides – it takes political leadership, not rocket science.   * Kevin Watkins is visiting professor of development practice at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (LSE), and was the chief executive of Save the Children UK, 2016-2021.   http://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/school-children-are-bearing-the-brunt-of-the-global-hunger-crisis-just-feed-them/ http://www.edc.org/sites/default/files/School-meals-Food-Systems.pdf http://www.wfp.org/school-meals Visit the related web page
	Act to secure a more sustainable, safer future for every child by UNICEF, Education International, UNESCO, agencies   Act to secure a more sustainable, safer future for every child, by Catherine Russell - Executive Director, UNICEF   Children everywhere are facing interlocking crises including hunger, lack of access to education and conflict — many of which exacerbate each other.   The interlocking crises of COVID-19, conflict, and climate change mean millions of children are being uprooted and pushed into poverty and starvation.   Disruptions in routine immunization and healthcare threaten a resurgence of life-threatening diseases like measles, while a global learning crisis risks becoming a global learning catastrophe for an entire generation of children.   But this can be prevented with a concerted global push to protect, support, and educate every child.   It is a dangerous time to be a child. In Ukraine, millions of children and families have fled the violent war that has engulfed their country — and exacerbated a global food crisis.   Years of conflict and crises in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen have shattered economies along with all the systems children rely on to survive and thrive.   The worst climate-induced crisis in 40 years is threatening 10 million children in the Horn of Africa — 1.7 million of whom could die without urgent treatment for severe acute malnutrition.   The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated threats to the world’s most vulnerable children – and created new risks to their lives and futures. Millions more children are living in poverty, millions more girls are at risk of child marriage, and millions more children are falling into learning poverty, lacking even the most basic skills.   Around the world today, more children are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance than at any time in UNICEF’s 75-year history.   The evidence is clear: we cannot meet our global development goals unless we reach these most-excluded children and invest in their potential.   System strengthening and humanitarian action   Currently, more than 400 million children live in conflict zones. Millions of them are out of school, without access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene. Millions are suffering from malnutrition — including its most severe and deadly forms.   The war in Ukraine has driven up food prices in places where children are already going hungry, like Yemen and Syria.   Our humanitarian response must not only meet these urgent needs. It should also help communities prepare for future shocks.   If we want to ‘future-proof’ our children, both public and private sectors need to invest in more resilient systems that help children cope, including health, nutrition, education, water and sanitation and social protection systems. Helping families to remain stable in crises yields cascading benefits, especially for children.   Primary health system strengthening   The pandemic has made clear that well-functioning and resilient primary health systems are the foundation of our ability to respond to health emergencies.   A fully resourced primary healthcare facility — staffed by well-trained, properly remunerated healthcare workers equipped with essential products and equipment — is the first line of defence against pandemics. It is also the most effective point of delivery for other essential health services, including nutrition and immunization.   Now is the moment for global action. Investing in primary health care can achieve three goals at once: healthier children, a more equitable end to the pandemic, and a lasting legacy of more resilient health systems and more sustainable societies.   Climate resilience and adaptation   UNICEF estimates that nearly 1 billion children are already at extremely high risk from the impacts of climate change. Without urgent action, it will be every child.   Governments have a responsibility to reduce emissions and invest in mitigation strategies. But we also need to work across sectors to help communities adapt to the immediate realities of climate change.   These investments will pay off. UNICEF estimates that $1 invested in adaptation may yield up to $10 in economic gains.   This area is primed for public partnerships to drive innovation — and especially partnerships with young people. Businesses can also help by investing in new technologies and green skills building, changing energy and water consumption practices and exerting influence through operations and supply chains.   The global learning crisis   Even before COVID-19, more than 260 million children were out of school. Half of all children living in low- and middle-income countries were unable to read a simple sentence at the age of 10.   Pandemic school closures and related disruptions in learning are turning a crisis into a catastrophe, with serious implications for children today — as well as the future workforce.   The impact of school closures could cost as much as $17 trillion in lifetime earnings for an entire generation.   We need to bring every child back into the classroom, assess their learning, help them catch up and support their wellbeing. Every child who needs it must have access to a remedial programme focused on basic reading and maths, the foundation of all future learning.   Business can help by investing in innovative ways to reach children and improve learning. They can also invest in skills training for young people, including transferable, digital, entrepreneurial and job-specific skills.   Mental health of children   COVID-19 lockdowns and other effects of the pandemic have had a deep impact on the mental health of adolescents and young people.   The pandemic has also revealed the gap between mental health needs and access to support services. Too many young people are not receiving treatment and support. Mental health challenges remain stigmatized and underfunded.   The cost of inaction is enormous: the estimated annual loss in human capital arising from mental health conditions in children and adolescents up to the age of 19 is $387.2 billion. We need a “whole of society” approach to promote mental health, engaging all sectors.   These are just a few areas where we can make a difference in the lives of millions of children. With so much evidence demonstrating the inseparable connection between the wellbeing of children and sustainable development, it is time to put children at the center of the public agenda.   Nelson Mandela famously said that “there is no keener reflection of a society than how it treats its children.” By extension, there can be no greater measure of a society’s sustainability than the investments it makes in the wellbeing of its children.   http://www.unicef.org/media/press-centre   May 2022   Soaring food prices driven by the war in Ukraine and pandemic-fuelled budget cuts are set to drive up child hunger.   UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell on the global food security crisis.   "This crisis is getting worse – and the lives of millions of children hang in the balance. "The combined force of conflict, climate change, and the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was already wreaking havoc on families’ ability to feed their children. Food prices had already hit all-time highs. The war in Ukraine has only made this worse, driving food, fuel, and fertilizer shortages.   "Over the last few months as Executive Director of UNICEF, I have seen with my own eyes what food insecurity means for the most vulnerable children and women.   "It means more than a shortage of food. It means hunger. Malnourishment. Disease. Excruciating pain. Death.   "In April, I visited Gode, in Ethiopia, where I met children suffering from severe wasting – the most lethal form of acute malnutrition. These children were so thin and frail, they seemed skeletal. It was painfully clear that without treatment, some of them might die.   "The month before, I travelled to Kandahar in Afghanistan, where I met the mother of a newborn. "She was so malnourished that when I put my arm around her shoulders, I could feel her bones through her wrap. When I held her baby, I could barely feel its weight in my arms.   "Most people have never heard of wasting, the most lethal form of malnutrition. But it is one of the leading underlying causes of preventable deaths in children – and it is on the rise, even in comparatively stable communities.   "Children suffering from wasting can’t eat normally. You can’t save starving babies with a bag of wheat. They need urgent therapeutic nutrition, delivered in the form of a paste we call RUTF – ready to use therapeutic food.   "RUTF can literally mean the difference between life and death for a child. "But this year, around 10 million children who desperately need it are not receiving it. To make matters worse, the price of RUTF has already risen by 16 per cent. If funding doesn’t increase immediately to meet these rising costs, hundreds of thousands of children will not receive this lifesaving treatment.   "A child malnutrition catastrophe is not inevitable. We know what works, and we know how to deliver it. But we need to come together – and we need to act now.   World a ‘virtual tinderbox’ for catastrophic levels of severe malnutrition in children.   The number of children with severe wasting was rising even before war in Ukraine threatened to plunge the world deeper into a spiralling global food crisis - and it’s getting worse, UNICEF warned in a new Child Alert.   Just released, Severe wasting: An overlooked child survival emergency shows that in spite of rising levels of severe wasting in children and rising costs for life-saving treatment, global financing to save the lives of children suffering from wasting is also under threat.   “Even before the war in Ukraine placed a strain on food security worldwide, conflict, climate shocks and COVID-19 were already wreaking havoc on families’ ability to feed their children,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “The world is rapidly becoming a virtual tinderbox of preventable child deaths and children suffering from wasting.   Currently, at least 10 million severely wasted children – or 2 in 3 – do not have access to the most effective treatment for wasting, ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF).   UNICEF warns that a combination of global shocks to food security worldwide – led by the war in Ukraine, economies struggling with pandemic recovery, and persistent drought conditions in some countries due to climate change – is creating conditions for a significant increase in global levels of severe wasting.   Meanwhile, the price of ready-to-use therapeutic food is projected to increase by up to 16 per cent over the next six months due to a sharp rise in the cost of raw ingredients. This could leave at least 600,000 additional children without access to life-saving treatment at current spending levels. Shipping and delivery costs are also expected to remain high.   “For millions of children every year, these sachets of therapeutic paste are the difference between life and death. A sixteen per cent price increase may sound manageable in the context of global food markets, but at the end of that supply chain is a desperately malnourished child, for whom the stakes are not manageable at all,” said Russell.   Severe wasting – where children are too thin for their height resulting in weakened immune systems – is the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition. Worldwide, millions of children under five suffer from severe wasting, resulting in 1 in 5 deaths among this age group.   South Asia remains the ‘epicentre’ of severe wasting, where roughly 1 in 22 children is severely wasted, three times as high as sub-Saharan Africa. And across the rest of the world, countries are facing historically high rates of severe wasting.   In Afghanistan, for example, 1.1 million children are expected to suffer from severe wasting this year, nearly double the number in 2018. Drought in the Horn of Africa means the number of children with severe wasting could quickly rise from 1.7 million to 2 million, while a 26 per cent increase is predicted in the Sahel compared to 2018.   The Child Alert also notes that even countries in relative stability, such as Uganda, have seen a 40 per cent or more increase in child wasting since 2016, due to rising poverty and household food insecurity causing inadequate quality and frequency of diets for children and pregnant women.   Climate-related shocks including severe cyclical drought and inadequate access to clean water and sanitation services are contributing to the rising numbers.   The report warns that aid for wasting remains woefully low and is predicted to decline sharply in the coming years, with little hope of recovering to pre-pandemic levels before 2028. Global aid spent on wasting amounts to just 2.8 per cent of the total health sector ODA (Official Development Assistance) and 0.2 per cent of total ODA spending.   To reach every child with life-saving treatment for severe wasting, UNICEF is calling for:   Governments to increase wasting aid by at least 59 per cent above 2019 ODA levels to help reach to help reach all children in need of treatment in 23 high burden countries.   Countries to include treatment for child wasting under health and long-term development funding schemes so that all children can benefit from treatment programmes, not just those in humanitarian crisis settings.   Ensure that budget allocations to address the global hunger crisis include specific allocations for therapeutic food interventions to address the immediate needs of children suffering from severe wasting.   Donors and civil society organizations to prioritize funding for wasting to ensure a diverse, growing and a healthy ecosystem of donor support.   “There is simply no reason why a child should suffer from severe wasting – not when we have the ability to prevent it. But there is precious little time to reignite a global effort to prevent, detect and treat malnutrition before a bad situation gets much, much worse,” said Russell.   http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/world-virtual-tinderbox-catastrophic-levels-severe-malnutrition-children http://www.unicef.org/topics/malnutrition http://reliefweb.int/report/somalia/irc-records-265-rise-nutrition-cases-risk-catastrophic-famine-somalia-increases http://www.msf.org/neglected-malnutrition-crisis-threatens-thousands-children-northwest-nigeria http://www.msf.org/malnutrition http://www.savethechildren.net/news/families-resorting-extreme-measures-survive-hunger-crisis-prompts-more-funding-save-children http://www.wfp.org/publications/hunger-hotspots-fao-wfp-early-warnings-acute-food-insecurity-june-september-2022 http://static.hungermapdata.org/insight-reports/latest/global-summary.pdf   Apr. 2022   23 countries – home to around 405 million schoolchildren – are yet to fully open schools   As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its third year, 23 countries – home to around 405 million schoolchildren – are yet to fully open schools, with many schoolchildren at risk of dropping out, according to a new UNICEF report released today.   Are children really learning? features country-level data on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures on children, as well as an updated analysis of the state of children’s learning before the pandemic. It points out that 147 million children missed more than half of their in-person schooling over the past 2 years. This amounts to 2 trillion hours of lost in-person learning globally.   “When children are not able to interact with their teachers and their peers directly, their learning suffers. When they are not able to interact with their teachers and peers at all, their learning loss may become permanent,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director. “This rising inequality in access to learning means that education risks becoming the greatest divider, not the greatest equalizer. When the world fails to educate its children, we all suffer.”   In addition to data on learning loss, the report points to emerging evidence that shows many children did not return to school when their classrooms reopened.   Data from Liberia show 43 per cent of students in public schools did not return when schools reopened in December 2020. The number of out-of-school children in South Africa tripled from 250,000 to 750,000 between March 2020 and July 2021. In Uganda, around 1 in 10 schoolchildren did not report back to school in January 2022 after schools were closed for two years. In Malawi, the dropout rate among girls in secondary education increased by 48 per cent, from 6.4 per cent to 9.5 per cent between 2020 and 2021. In Kenya, a survey of 4,000 adolescents aged 10-19 years found that 16 per cent of girls and 8 per cent of boys did not return when schools reopened.   Out-of-school children are some of the most vulnerable and marginalized children in society. They are the least likely to be able to read, write or do basic math, and are cut off from the safety net that schools provide, which puts them at an increased risk of exploitation and a lifetime of poverty and deprivation.   The report highlights that while out-of-school children suffer the greatest loss, pre-pandemic data from 32 countries and territories show a desperately poor level of learning, a situation that has likely been exacerbated by the scale of learning lost to the pandemic. In the countries analysed, the current pace of learning is so slow that it would take seven years for most schoolchildren to learn foundational reading skills that should have been grasped in two years, and 11 years to learn foundational numeracy skills.   In many cases, there is no guarantee that schoolchildren learned the basics at all. In the 32 countries and territories examined, a quarter of Grade 8 schoolchildren – around 14 years old – did not have foundational reading skills and more than half did not have numeracy skills expected of a Grade 2 student, around 7 years old.   “Even before the pandemic, the most marginalized children were being left behind. As the pandemic enters its third year, we can’t afford to go back to “normal.” We need a new normal: getting children into classrooms, assessing where they are in their learning, providing them with the intensive support they need to recover what they’ve missed, and ensuring that teachers have the training and learning resources they need. The stakes are too high to do anything less,” said Russell.   http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/23-countries-yet-fully-reopen-schools-education-risks-becoming-greatest-divider http://www.wvi.org/publications/education/transforming-education-protect-childrens-rights-emergencies-and-crises http://www.educationcannotwait.org/news-stories/press-releases/education-cannot-wait-222-million-crisis-impacted-children-in-urgent http://www.srpoverty.org/2022/06/10/panel-transforming-education-advancing-childrens-rights-for-todays-world/ http://actionaid.org/opinions/2022/transforming-financing-education http://www.unicef.org/reports/state-global-learning-poverty-2022 http://alliancecpha.org/en/school_closures_participatory_research   Jan. 2022   More than 635 million students remain affected by full or partial school closures. On the International Day of Education and as the COVID-19 pandemic nears its two-year mark, UNICEF shares the latest available data on the impact of the pandemic on children’s learning.   “In March, we will mark two years of COVID-19-related disruptions to global education. Quite simply, we are looking at a nearly insurmountable scale of loss to children’s schooling,” said Robert Jenkins, UNICEF Chief of Education.   “While the disruptions to learning must end, just reopening schools is not enough. Students need intensive support to recover lost education. Schools must also go beyond places of learning to rebuild children’s mental and physical health, social development and nutrition.”   Children have lost basic numeracy and literacy skills. Globally, disruption to education has meant millions of children have significantly missed out on the academic learning they would have acquired if they had been in the classroom, with younger and more marginalized children facing the greatest loss.   In low- and middle-income countries, learning losses to school closures have left up to 70 per cent of 10-year-olds unable to read or understand a simple text, up from 53 per cent pre-pandemic.   In Ethiopia, primary school children are estimated to have learned between 30 to 40 per cent of the math they would have learned if it had been a normal school year.   In the US, learning losses have been observed in many states including Texas, California, Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Maryland. In Texas, for example, two thirds of children in grade 3 tested below their grade level in math in 2021, compared to half of children in 2019.   In several Brazilian states, around 3 in 4 children in grade 2 are off-track in reading, up from 1 in 2 children pre-pandemic. Across Brazil, 1 in 10 students aged 10-15 reported they are not planning to return to school once their schools reopen.   In South Africa, schoolchildren are between 75 per cent and a full school year behind where they should be. Some 400,000 to 500,000 students reportedly dropped out of school altogether between March 2020 and July 2021.   Follow-on consequences of school closures are on the rise. In addition to learning loss, school closures have impacted children’s mental health, reduced their access to a regular source of nutrition, and increased their risk of abuse.   A growing body of evidence shows that COVID-19 has caused high rates of anxiety and depression among children and young people, with some studies finding that girls, adolescents and those living in rural areas are most likely to experience these problems.   More than 370 million children globally missed out on school meals during school closures, losing what is for some children the only reliable source of food and daily nutrition.   http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/covid19-scale-education-loss-nearly-insurmountable-warns-unicef http://news.un.org/en/audio/2022/01/1110372 http://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse http://uni.cf/343jEWA http://bit.ly/3qWeQey http://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2022/1/17/COVID-education-urgent-humanitarian-issue-school-closures http://www.ips-journal.eu/interviews/it-was-traumatising-for-the-children-5659/ http://www.educationcannotwait.org/about-us/ http://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/26215:international-day-of-education-reality-check-governments-are-failing-students-and-teachers http://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/25647:better-education-financing-and-regulation-of-private-interests-is-urgent-to-ensure-equitable-inclusive-and-resilient-education-systems http://www.gi-escr.org/private-actors-social-services/education Visit the related web page
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