Carrying Children Through COVID-19 and Beyond
For more than a decade, you’ve worked alongside us to call for a focus on children at the highest risk of deadly infections like diarrheal disease, pneumonia, and other health threats.
But even as we celebrate decades of progress, children and families now face the unprecedented threat of COVID-19’s cascading impacts: disrupted immunization services and supply chains, malnutrition, overwhelmed health systems, and worsening economies conspire to unravel progress. UNICEF calls COVID-19 the biggest threat to child progress in its 75-year history. Indeed, the Global Financing Facility estimates an average of 2.6 indirect maternal and child death per each COVID-19 death officially reported in the same period.
What if COVID-19 inspired us to build back better?
Pre-pandemic, global equity in child survival was an unfinished story. COVID-19 has uncovered and widened the gap; inequitable access to high-impact tools and other systemic failures that trap communities in a cycle of poor health and poverty persist.
Taken together, the successes of preceding decades and the weak points exposed by the global pandemic offer us a roadmap. We only need to choose it.
Targeted investments in tools like vaccines, hygiene education and water access, and essential medicines – basics of primary healthcare – are how we carry children and their families through COVID-19 and forge a brighter future beyond it.
No child should die from diarrhea because of COVID-19. No child should die from diarrhea, ever.
Use these resources to help us guide policymaker action.