Nearly 830 million children do not have access to a computer at home, according to UNESCO.
April 22, 2020 - The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is making the stark digital divide in education more apparent than ever as children around the world try to learn remotely, new data shows.
The United Nations’ education agency UNESCO released figures from the International Telecommunication Union that were collected by the Teacher Task Force, an international coalition of teachers.
At least 1.5 billion students and 63 million primary and secondary teachers are affected by school closures in the wake of the pandemic in 191 countries. The data revealed that half of all students, nearly 830 million children, who are not currently attending school due to stay-at-home orders, do not have access to a computer. More than 40% do not have internet access at home.
Population ageing is a phenomenon that affects almost every developed country in the world, with both the number and proportion of older people growing across the globe. This transformation is likely to have a considerable impact on most aspects of society and the economy, including housing, healthcare and social protection, labour markets, the demand for goods and services, macroeconomic and fiscal sustainability, family structures and intergenerational ties.
Direct Link to Full 162-Page 2019 Publication:
Violence against women and girls is a global problem of epidemic proportions. Evidence shows that over one-third of women and girls globally will experience some form of violence in their lifetime. Regardless of where they live, their religion or culture, or what stage of life they are in, each is a target of violence specifically because of her gender and the gender discrimination that persists globally. Gender-based violence (GBV) is exacerbated in emergencies, where vulnerability and risks are higher and most often, family and community protections have broken down.
Direct Link to Full 56-Page 2019 Publication:
https://voiceamplified.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/WHERE-IS-THE-MONEY-wAnnexes.pdf.pdf
We are telling people to wash their hands but in 2020, for most of humanity, water is a luxury. For the lucky few, the shortages are seasonal. For the vast majority, they are perennial. The next piece of advice, to drink water frequently and stay hydrated, makes no sense to people who still do not access clean drinking water
By SWARNA RAJAGOPALAN
April 9, 2020 - The Coronavirus/ COVID-19 Pandemic is a complex emergency, a term which was used a great deal two decades ago to capture the reality that bad things rarely happen in isolation of other bad things. When disasters are layered over conflicts which are layered over structural inequalities, for instance, you have a complex emergency.
What we are seeing, with this pandemic crisis is precisely such a situation—where a pandemic situation has suddenly descended upon us, where we were already dealing with a spectrum of conflicts, the consequences of disasters, large-scale displacement and human rights violations, plus structural inequalities, necessitating severe responses like lockdowns, which have set in motion a humanitarian crisis of perhaps equal proportions. Each of these individual situations is the product of governance failures, and together they seem to be crumbling at our feet like a Jenga tower.
