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	The Pandemic’s Cruelty to the World’s Children by Barbara Crossette Pass Blue: New School Graduate Program in International Affairs   There are about two billion young children in the world today, ranging from infancy to 14 years old, and most of them live in developing nations in the global south. That is also where the Covid-19 pandemic is spreading the fastest.   Three of the top 10 countries in numbers of rapidly rising cases, as of June 15, were located in developing counties: Brazil, India and Peru, with dozens of others moving up the count in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.   The World Bank, announcing the largest and quickest crisis response in its history, said in mid-May that it had begun emergency operations to support — with $160 billion in financial aid — 100 countries that contain 70 percent of the world’s 7.8 billion people.   Figures are historic, but the most dramatic extent of the pandemic is often revealed in the vulnerability of the most powerless: children. Sensitive to their surroundings even if they do not understand the events in the world around them, millions of children are now hungrier, exposed to more violence from an aggressive man in the home during lockdowns, deprived of education and, recently, found to be in more danger of entrapment into slave labor, potentially reversing gains just made. More girls are being driven into forced marriages, surveys predict.   While children may not, or not yet, be counted among the most serious Covid-19 cases, whatever basic health care they had access to before the pandemic struck may have been lost, including childhood vaccinations against old diseases. Advocates for children are asking global health officials to make sure that if and when a vaccine against Covid-19 is introduced that it will be available at little or no cost in developing countries.   Children are also starving, falling ill and dying for lack of medical care in regional military conflicts. Attacks on schools and hospitals by both government and militant movements are killing them. Forced recruitment resurges on both sides.   On June 15, the United Nations released its latest annual report on children in armed conflict, which found that there were 25,000 recorded “grave violations” against children in 2019. It also noted a 400 percent increase in the denial of access to humanitarian organizations last year.   Virginia Gamba, the secretary-general’s special envoy for children in armed conflict, called it “by far the most worrisome trend in 2019.” There are also more impediments to the work of aid officials, the report said.   Yemen, Mali, the Central African Republic, Syria, Afghanistan and Israel-Palestine were named in the report as the most worrying situations.   In the case of Yemen — where a civil war expanded in 2015 into a subregional conflict between the Saudi Arabian-backed Yemeni government of mostly Sunni Arab Muslims and rebels from the Houthi, a tribally based Zaydi Shia movement that is reported to have close ties to Iran — there was immediate international criticism.   The anger focused on a decision by Secretary-General António Guterres to remove the Saudi-United Arab Emirates military coalition from a UN blacklist of countries committing serious violations involving children. Guterres’s report said that the coalition had killed or injured 222 children in Yemen last year, including in 171 airstrikes, but that these incidents were decreasing. This reduction, Guterres said, justified his removing the Saudis from the list of major offenders and initiating a year of monitoring instead.   At a virtual news conference on June 15, while releasing the report, Gamba, the special representative, did not rigorously defend the move to delist the Saudi coalition. It was apparently not one of her own team’s conclusions. She said that this was entirely the secretary-general’s decision.   Jo Becker, the children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said that the secretary-general had added a new level of shame to his ‘list of shame’ by removing the Saudi-led coalition and ignoring the UN’s own evidence of continued grave violations.   “The secretary-general has brought shame on the UN by removing the Saudi-led coalition from his ‘list of shame’ even as it continues to kill and injure children in Yemen,” Becker said in a statement. “He has repeatedly and inexcusably left powerful countries off his list despite overwhelming UN evidence of grave violations against children.”   Adrianne Lapar, the director of Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, an international advocacy group, said that by removing the Saudi-led coalition from the list, “the Secretary-General sends the message that powerful actors can get away with killing children.”   Among other countries singled out in the secretary-general’s report was Afghanistan, the world’s deadliest conflict for children last year, for the fifth consecutive year, with 874 children killed in 2019. They were among the 3,410 young Afghans who suffered from “grave violations,” which included maiming, abduction, sexual abuse and attacks at schools and hospitals, the report released on June 15 said. The Taliban were cited in 1,238 deaths and injuries, the largest number attributed to any single group.   Next in importance to establishing peace and security, economic development would rank very high for today’s children now and in the future, and education is key to that. Both are being set back by the pandemic, new reports from many sources are demonstrating.   Not long ago in developing countries, where burgeoning youth populations were considered to be “demographic dividends,” ensuring large, better-educated work forces for years to come, experts now see negative trends. Africa is a case in point.   The donor-supported Global Partnership for Education, based in Washington, D.C., strategizes with dozens of governments in Africa, Asia and the Latin American-Caribbean region in designing and improving educational opportunities, especially for girls. It recently published a paper titled “After Covid-19, education in Africa will not be the same.”   The paper, based on data from the World Bank, Unesco and the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, noted that even before the pandemic, Africa had the world’s highest rate of exclusion from education.   “Today, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, over 250 million primary and secondary children are out of school in Africa,” the paper said. “The education sector is heavily affected, with the closure of learning institutions in many African countries.” Many students at all levels of education may never go back, some educators believe.   Learning online or through other communication technologies, such as television, radio and mobile phones, are being tried in some places.   “These strategies have been successful in some ways, but challenges remain as the poor marginalized children who neither have access to mobile phones or TV, or even radios for that matter, are excluded,” the paper said. “If these challenges are not addressed immediately, they can seriously affect the academic career of our students and in the long term bring about serious social and economic implications.”   The World Bank has concluded that the pandemic and the shutdown of rich economies on which many poor countries depend “could push as many as 80 million people into extreme poverty,” reversing earlier global gains.   Turning to the social effects on children and the psychological as well as physical damage to them, their desperate families and shattered communities, the International Labor Organization (ILO) published a report on June 12 in conjunction with Unicef, titled “COVID-19 and Child Labour: A time of crisis, a time to act.”   The starting point of this report is the scale of disruption. “Some 55 per cent of people globally — about 4 billion — do not have any social protection,” it says. “They are extremely vulnerable to shocks now and over the long term. . . . Millions of children are at risk of being pushed into child labour as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. That would mean a rise in child labour for the first time since 2000.”   As the crisis worsens, more families are likely to break apart, and children become the victims of exploitive recruiters and smugglers, the report adds. “When families cannot find work and run out of options for sustenance even at home, children may be sent away, rendering them vulnerable to exploitation. Similar consequences may result if family members relocate or separate. Children left behind or alone are even less protected and more vulnerable to the worst forms of labour.”   The ILO lists among the worst forms of child labor that can emerge from a crisis like the current pandemic: slavery, involuntary recruitment as child soldiers and beggars, debt bondage, serfdom, sexual exploitation as prostitutes or performers in pornography, drug trafficking and forced work in mines or other hazardous environments.   Repeated requests by PassBlue to Unicef and its executive director, Henrietta Fore, for comment on the darkening world of children in 2020 went unanswered. Unicef is the prime agency charged with the care and protection of children.   At Human Rights Watch, Jo Becker, the children’s rights advocate, was forthright in her concern.   “The Covid19 pandemic will forever define the lives of today’s children,” she wrote in a memo to PassBlue. “Some will remember their disrupted education, while others suffer more dramatic hardships, including the loss of family members, family violence, or increasingly desperate poverty due to the global economic crisis.”   “For this generation of children,” she added, “the pandemic represents a cross-roads between long-term harm and disadvantage, versus government action to build better systems and protect the most vulnerable.” Visit the related web page
	COVID-19 disrupts global immunization campaigns by UNICEF, WHO, End Violence Against Children   22 May 2020   At least 80 million children under one are at risk of diseases such as diphtheria, measles and polio as COVID-19 disrupts routine vaccination efforts, warn Gavi, WHO and UNICEF. Calling for a joint effort to safely deliver routine immunization and proceed with vaccination campaigns against deadly vaccine-preventable diseases.   COVID 19 is disrupting life-saving immunization services around the world, putting millions of children - in rich and poor countries alike - at risk of diseases like diphtheria, measles and polio. The stark warning comes from the World Health Organization, UNICEF and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance ahead of the Global Vaccine Summit on 4 June, at which world leaders will come together to help maintain immunization programmes and mitigate the impact of the pandemic.   According to data collected by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Gavi and the Sabin Vaccine Institute, provision of routine immunization services is substantially hindered in at least 68 countries and is likely to affect approximately 80 million children under the age of 1 living in these countries.   Since March 2020, routine childhood immunization services have been disrupted on a global scale. More than half (53%) of the 129 countries where data were available reported moderate-to-severe disruptions, or a total suspension of vaccination services during March-April 2020.   'Immunization is one of the most powerful and fundamental disease prevention tools in the history of public health', said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. 'Disruption to immunization programmes from the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to unwind decades of progress against vaccine-preventable diseases.. We must not forget the dozens of lifesaving vaccines that already exist and must continue to reach children everywhere'.   'More children in more countries are now protected against more vaccine-preventable diseases than at any point in history', said Dr. Seth Berkley, Gavi CEO. Due to COVID-19 this progress is now under threat, risking the resurgence of diseases like measles and polio. Not only will maintaining immunization programmes prevent more outbreaks, it will also ensure we have the infrastructure we need to roll out an eventual COVID-19 vaccine on a global scale.   Transport delays of vaccines are exacerbating the situation. UNICEF has reported a substantial delay in planned vaccine deliveries due to the lockdown measures and the ensuing decline in commercial flights and limited availability of charters. To help mitigate this, UNICEF is appealing to governments, the private sector, the airline industry, and others, to free up freight space at an affordable cost for these life-saving vaccines.   'We cannot let our fight against one disease come at the expense of long-term progress in our fight against other diseases', said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director.   'We have effective vaccines against measles, polio and cholera. While circumstances may require us to temporarily pause some immunization efforts, these immunizations must restart as soon as possible, or we risk exchanging one deadly outbreak for another'.   http://news.un.org/en/story/2020/05/1064772 http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/least-80-million-children-under-one-risk-diseases-such-diphtheria-measles-and-polio http://www.who.int/news-room/detail/22-05-2020-at-least-80-million-children-under-one-at-risk-of-diseases-such-as-diphtheria-measles-and-polio-as-covid-19-disrupts-routine-vaccination-efforts-warn-gavi-who-and-unicef http://alliancecpha.org/en/series-of-child-protection-materials/protection-children-during-covid-19-pandemic   24 April 2020   COVID-19 disrupts global immunization - Mass measles immunization campaigns suspended in 25 largely high-burden countries due to pandemic. (UNICEF)   As the world waits desperately for a vaccine, the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to surge across the globe. Millions of children are in danger of missing life-saving vaccines against measles, diphtheria and polio due to disruptions in immunization services.   At last count, most countries had suspended mass polio campaigns and 25 countries had postponed mass measles campaigns, as per recommended guidance.   Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, measles, polio and other vaccines were out of reach for 20 million children below the age of one every year. Over 13 million children below the age of one globally did not receive any vaccines at all in 2018, many of whom live in countries with weak health systems.   Given the current disruptions, this could create pathways to disastrous outbreaks in 2020 and well beyond.   'The stakes have never been higher. As COVID-19 continues to spread globally, our life-saving work to provide children with vaccines is critical', said Robin Nandy, UNICEF Principal Adviser and Chief of Immunization. With disruptions in immunization services due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fates of millions of young lives hang in the balance.   An estimated 182 million children missed out on the first dose of the measles vaccine between 2010 and 2018, or 20.3 million children a year on average, according to a UNICEF analysis.   Widening pockets of unvaccinated children led to alarming measles outbreaks in 2019, including in high-income countries like the US, UK and France.   Among low-income countries, the gaps in measles coverage before COVID-19 were already alarming. Between 2010 and 2018, Ethiopia had the highest number of children under one year of age who missed out on the first dose of measles, at nearly 10.9 million. It was followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (6.2 million), Afghanistan (3.8 million), Chad, Madagascar and Uganda with about 2.7 million each.   Beyond measles, the immunization gaps were already quite dire. In Africa, more children have missed out on vaccines over the past years due to rising number of births and a stagnation in immunization services.   For example, in West and Central Africa, coverage has stagnated at 70 per cent for DTP3 - which is the lowest among all regions - at 70 per cent for polio, and at 71 per cent for measles. This has led to repeated outbreaks of measles and polio in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.   Meanwhile, in South Asia, an estimated 3.2 million children did not receive any vaccines in 2018. In Eastern and Southern Africa, the number of unvaccinated children has remained almost the same for the last decade, at around 2 million. All regions are now also battling COVID-19 outbreaks.   As the world races to develop and test a new COVID-19 vaccine, UNICEF and partners in the Measles & Rubella Initiative and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance are calling on governments and donors to:   Sustain immunization services while keeping health workers and communities safe; Start planning to ramp up vaccinations for every missed child when the pandemic ends; Fully replenish Gavi, as the alliance supports immunization programmes in the future; Ensure that when the COVID-19 vaccine is available, it reaches those most in need.   'Children missing out now on vaccines must not go their whole lives without protection from disease', said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance The legacy of COVID-19 must not include the global resurgence of other killers like measles and polio.   http://measlesrubellainitiative.org/measles-news/more-than-117-million-children-at-risk-of-missing-out-on-measles-vaccines-as-covid-19-surges/ http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/over-13-million-children-did-not-receive-any-vaccines-all-even-covid-19-disrupted http://www.who.int/news-room/detail/23-04-2020-hard-fought-gains-in-immunization-coverage-at-risk-without-critical-health-services-warns-who http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/05/polio-measles-outbreaks-inevitable-say-vaccine-experts/   Apr. 2020   Protecting Children from Violence, Abuse and Neglect in the Home   It is abundantly clear that risk factors for violence, abuse, and neglect are on the rise for children under containment.   At the same time, some COVID-19 prevention measures have abruptly cut children off from positive and supportive relationships they rely on when in distress, including at school, in the extended family, and in the community.   Children's rights to safety and protection as outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action are threatened.   This resource, which is informed by reports from the field, examines issues that children may face as countries implement lockdowns and stay-at-home orders to curb the spread of COVID-19. Protective prevention and response strategies are then outlined with the goal of strengthening the protection of children in all types of homes.   * Access the resource here: http://bit.ly/35BEoBy Visit the related web page
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