Five Opportunities for Children That We Must Seize Now : Henrietta Fore

 

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to share my second annual letter, (see below)   “Five Opportunities for Children We Must Seize Now.” As we kick off our 75th year, I am urging the world to take action around these critical priorities: vaccines, digital education, mental health, discrimination and inequality, and climate change. Unless there are increased investments in these issues, recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be that much harder. The international community must support an inclusive recovery that prioritizes investments for children.

I encourage our entire UNICEF family to read the letter, share it publicly and use it broadly to advance ongoing advocacy and communication, tying it to your discussions with key stakeholders, from policymakers and government ministries, to corporate partners and civil society organizations. The letter is available on all of our global channels.

Across UNICEF, we all have a role to play in implementing the solutions outlined in the letter. Together, we will continue adapting and changing to the needs of children and young people. Our post-pandemic rebuilding must meet the scale of this moment by working across generations to reimagine a better world for children.


Henrietta H. Fore
Executive Director

COVID-19 is the first truly global crisis we have seen in our lifetime. No matter where we live, the pandemic affects every person – children most of all. Millions are missing out on basic health services, education and protection simply because they were born into poverty or because of their ethnicity, religion or race. COVID-19 has widened this inequality gap and the social, economic and health impacts of the pandemic will reverberate for years to come, threatening child rights. 

But this is not the time to be intimidated or paralyzed by these challenges. As we kick off UNICEF’s 75th anniversary, we are reminded that this organization was created in the midst of another historic crisis in the aftermath of World War II. Back then, it would have been easy to be overwhelmed by the scale of the problems facing children in a war-ravaged world. But we reimagined what was possible. We built new health and welfare systems around the world. We defeated smallpox. We built the United Nations.

History is calling upon us once again. In previous major global crises, from world wars to pandemics, leaders have come together to negotiate deals and pacts, agreeing to build new ways to restore peace, recover and rebuild, and to cooperate.

We need to rally the world behind a practical and concrete plan to protect our children – a promise from our generation to the next to invest in health and education, build more resilient systems and services that can reach all children, and ensure that budget cuts and economic downturns do not harm them.

While we must be clear-eyed about the scale of the challenges facing the world’s children, we can also advance in partnership and solidarity by building on our past, with ambition and confidence in our future.

This is not about a return to the way things were. For hundreds of millions of children around the world, ‘normal’ was never good enough to begin with.

Here are five opportunities for the world’s children revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and five lessons on how we can reimagine a better future for them, as reflected in the voices of young people.

1: For vaccines to work, we must build trust

2: Bridging the digital divide can help bring quality education for all

3: COVID-19 has unlocked attention on global youth mental health

4: COVID-19 does not discriminate, but our societies do

5: Climate change is the other planetary crisis that won’t wait