The Sustainable Development Goals highlight the critical importance of pre-primary education and set the broad ambition that by 2030 all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education. Today, the world is facing a learning crisis: While millions of…

"The Global Framework on Transferable Skills" has been developed to support UNICEF in delivering on the results of its "Strategic Plan 2018-2021" and "Every Child Learns: UNICEF Education Strategy 2019-2030," and provides a shared vision of work on skills development across UNICEF. The Framework guides UNICEF country…

"Growing Steady and Strong: Early Childhood Development Regional Guidance in East Asia and the Pacific" was developed against the backdrop of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis to support the country offices of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in implementing the early childhood development (ECD) agenda as a key pillar…

The global effort to achieve sanitation and water for all by 2030 is extending beyond the household to include institutional settings, such as schools, healthcare facilities and workplaces. This has been reinforced by global education for all strategies highlighting how water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in schools improves access to education…

This research takes a mixed methods and design-led approach to understand how adolescents in Southeast Asia interact and engage with the variety of content and platforms available online. The research aimed to understand whether adolescents are developing relevant 21st century and digital skills through online platforms, and whether and how online…

This edition of "The State of the World's Children" report examines children, food and nutrition. It seeks to deepen understanding around the causes and consequences of children's malnutrition in all its forms and to highlight how governments, business, families and other stakeholders can best respond. Chapter 1 examines the changing…

Over 11 million cases of coronavirus have been reported in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than seven months after the first case hit Brazil, COVID-19 has deprived 97 per cent of the region's students of their normal schooling. Across the region, the prolonged closure of schools means that 137 million boys and girls continue to miss out on…

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, resulting in disruptions to education at an unprecedented scale. In response to the urgent need to recover learning losses, countries worldwide have taken RAPID actions to: Reach every child and keep them in school; Assess learning levels regularly; Prioritize…

Through strong working relationships and a responsive approach for systems strengthening, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Turkey has been able to effectively integrate its humanitarian and refugee-related programmes into its wider strategic approach to increase the potential for every child to learn. In doing so, UNICEF has worked…

This Report Card offers an assessment of child well-being in the context of sustainable development across 41 countries of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Specifically, this report seeks to bring the SDG [Sustainable Development Goal] targets for children in high-income countries into…

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. This joint report by UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) presents new insights into children and young people's access to digital…

There are nearly 200 million lower and upper secondary age adolescent girls and boys out of school globally, and if current trends continue, another 825 million children will not acquire basic secondary-level skills by 2030. Global momentum to achieve universal primary education has placed increased demands on secondary education systems to serve…

Seventy years after UNICEF was established, the organization's mission to promote the full attainment of the rights of all children is as urgent as ever. The UNICEF Strategic Plan, 2018-2021 is anchored in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and charts a course towards attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals and the realization of a…

This paper aggregates the academic literature reviewing and reporting interventions for out-of-school children (OOSC) around the world to serve as a guide for potential interventions in South Asia and elsewhere. It complements the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children (OOSCI) South Asia Regional Study (2014). Thus the interventions reviewed…

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised huge concerns for the mental health of an entire generation of children. But the pandemic may represent only the tip of a mental health iceberg -- an iceberg we have ignored for far too long. For the first time, "The State of the World's Children" examines the mental health of children and adolescents.…