UNICEF: Children Will Need Almost a Decade to Recover from Lockdowns
“In less than two years, 100 million more children have fallen into poverty, a 10 percent increase since 2019,” UNICEF, a U.N. agency that provides humanitarian and developmental aid to poor children globally, wrote on December 9.
The report included a call to “resume in-person learning” for school-aged children, millions of whom have been affected by ongoing coronavirus lockdowns that either shut down local schools or prohibit in-person classes.
“By September 2021, schoolchildren around the world have lost an estimated 1.8 trillion hours of in-person learning due to COVID-related school closures, which will have profound long-term, unequal social and economic effects,” UNICEF revealed.
Jean Gough, UNICEF regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, warned in March 2021 that “children and adolescents [in Latin America] have been out of the classroom longer than any other boy, girl or adolescent in the world” due to coronavirus lockdowns.
UNICEF collected health data from 191 countries by May 2021 indicating that “reopening schools does not represent a health risk,” Infobae reported at the time.