What is in store for the world’s children when UNICEF celebrates its one hundredth birthday in 2046? Predictions risk dangerous paths. Yet, developments in the world today offer intriguing possibilities.
Will the trauma effects of COVID-19 in 2020-21 have this effect on the world’s population? Yes! Social scientists will add other concerns to the traumatic situations as part of the world’s rebooting. These include: (1) climate change, (2) global migration, (3) social media and the internet, and (4) global governance and the global economy, including violence and warfare.
Community efforts expanded as women’s groups monitored government welfare handouts to ensure proper allocation to deserving recipients, often sharing some of their own allotments with left-out families. Many mothers learned the intricacies of online learning as they supervised their children’s school work. This in turn enhanced local women leaders’ ability to organize Zoom-style meetings on their cellphones with members and NGO partners to address community issues.
Neighbors took sick members to local hospitals, often moving with them from one facility to another in search of beds. They helped families quarantined at home by going to the market for them and bringing them cooked food. Residents linked up with NGO and faith-based partners providing them fresh food, protective gear and medicine. They welcomed and redistributed donations from compassionate citizens and government officials offering relief goods and money allotments.
Poor people’s resilience in traumatic times has thus led them to believe they have virtually no choice but to try alternative commitments for survival. Their children have gone through a similar exploration process testing unfamiliar possibilities. This learned flexibility augurs well for their future. Moreover, the newfound validity of universal health care cast in a public health, community-led context can make significant contributions to children’s wellbeing. Active civil society groups can be expected to continue pressing for effective ways of implementing attractive and innovative reforms
Urban planners and the citizenry already know that cities will have to revise their layouts and construction designs in favor of green buildings, open spaces and renewable energy. For poor families in the city, that calls for decent and affordable housing near their places of work, parks, bicycle and walking paths, mass transit, electric vehicles and the shift to renewable energy. Children growing up in that setting can thus legitimately expect more out of life.
Global governance must also recognize the emerging calls for a more just world by reformulating economic systems that prioritize human wellbeing ahead of uncontrolled profits. These growing humanitarian and social justice advocacies may gain the commitment of populations who have learned that “the new normal” cannot be a replication of the unacceptable “old normal” with a few frills added. Universal commitments to children mean triggering genuine transformational processes in the coming 25 years. Making that happen becomes the true test for UNICEF working with reform-oriented government, private sector and civil society partners.
How Have Children Suffered during the Pandemic?
Evidence from around the world shows that the impact of lockdowns, especially in poor families, has meant that millions of children have gone hungry. Starting with breastfeeding, a mother may not have had the time to feed her baby because she was out looking for some kind of income or charitable donation. Moreover, being malnourished herself, she may have had little to offer the child. Health clinics, which had formerly offered vaccinations against children’s diseases, shifted their priorities to Covid patients. Nutritional supplements were sidelined, seriously threatening the young child’s brain development. For school aged children ,With the advent of online learning, children experienced great difficulty learning at home. Too many ultimately dropped out in order to join the family’s income search. Since schools were closed, school lunches as sources of nutritious food were no longer available. Access to food became precarious as parents’ earnings plunged during long and frequent lockdowns. Relief packages from government and civil society sources all too often featured foods of low nutritive value. COVID captured the attention of the health services, marginalizing other services for children and women. Living in crowded housing because everyone was home during the lockdown sometimes led to violence and abuse on the part of angry and frustrated adults.Like their younger siblings, adolescents giving up on online learning or actually dropping out of school were compelled to join the family’s income search. Violence and abuse at home are chronic for some, with incest mentioned as entering the scene. Teen-age pregnancies are on the rise in some countries as out-of-school youngsters hang around idle in locked down communities. In some countries, destitution increasingly led to child and early marriage of girls. Little wonder that mental health has emerged as a subject of major concern. The worst scenarios came when a mother or father succumbed to COVID-19, illnesses sidelined by the pandemic, civil conflict or warfare leaving their children full or partial orphans.
How Have Children, Families and Communities Adapted to the Pandemic?
In the Philippines , the situation has not been totally grim, however. Difficult scenarios have been offset by countervailing joys. urban poor households valued the chance to spend more family time together. They explored new options for earning like food delivery services or baking and selling native delicacies online to neighbors and friends. Others cultivated communal gardens, managed community kitchens catering to the most disadvantaged, and joined projects that turned plastic waste into sale-able items or that restored shoreline mangroves to protect settlements from typhoon damage.Community efforts expanded as women’s groups monitored government welfare handouts to ensure proper allocation to deserving recipients, often sharing some of their own allotments with left-out families. Many mothers learned the intricacies of online learning as they supervised their children’s school work. This in turn enhanced local women leaders’ ability to organize Zoom-style meetings on their cellphones with members and NGO partners to address community issues.
Neighbors took sick members to local hospitals, often moving with them from one facility to another in search of beds. They helped families quarantined at home by going to the market for them and bringing them cooked food. Residents linked up with NGO and faith-based partners providing them fresh food, protective gear and medicine. They welcomed and redistributed donations from compassionate citizens and government officials offering relief goods and money allotments.
Poor people’s resilience in traumatic times has thus led them to believe they have virtually no choice but to try alternative commitments for survival. Their children have gone through a similar exploration process testing unfamiliar possibilities. This learned flexibility augurs well for their future. Moreover, the newfound validity of universal health care cast in a public health, community-led context can make significant contributions to children’s wellbeing. Active civil society groups can be expected to continue pressing for effective ways of implementing attractive and innovative reforms
Prospects for 2046
What will continuing and new traumas mean for children in the coming 25 years? Much depends on the steps countries and the world at large take in the coming years. Here are some facets of that trajectory.Climate Change.
If world citizens finally decide seriously to address climate change threats, environmental protection issues come prominently to the fore. That means protecting forests from chain-saws, controlling carbon and methane emissions, preventing fires, conserving water and managing wastes. Necessareily linked will be a commitment to modest lifestyles in keeping with the new realities of human existence. As for young people, since they are already in the forefront of these movements, they will likely reinforce into adulthood their roles as progressive advocates. Otherwise they know they will enter their adult lives facing massive flooding, forest fires, extremes of heat and cold, exacerbated by inevitable earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Add to this the declining number and diversity of the birds and animals that keep natural world cycles going.Urban planners and the citizenry already know that cities will have to revise their layouts and construction designs in favor of green buildings, open spaces and renewable energy. For poor families in the city, that calls for decent and affordable housing near their places of work, parks, bicycle and walking paths, mass transit, electric vehicles and the shift to renewable energy. Children growing up in that setting can thus legitimately expect more out of life.
Social Media, the Internet and New Technology
Since this generation will be thoroughly familiar with social media, by 2046 online systems should have already instituted safeguards to enhance virtual communications while dislodging negative elements. Youth training can be expected to accompany new technologies featuring everything from robots handling complex tasks, sending space ships to the solar system, and utilizing underwater resources of large ocean masses responsibly. Learning modes will grow exponentially as young people push the frontiers of science technology and the existential reflections engendered. Linking participation on social media with on-the-ground actions is inevitable even as solely online interaction remains a continuing challenge.Global Migration
The world is moving as masses of migrants leave their home countries fleeing from warfare and economic devastation in search of better life opportunities for their children. Whether they are abandoning a country because of violence or limited employment, they envision a future for their children not repetitive of their own lives of poverty and powerlessness. By 2046 much will depend on how welcoming the receiving population has been to their entry and/or how effectively the wealthier countries have supported developing countries’ efforts to resolve the strife while reducing corruption and violence. A major challenge in the receiving societies will be giving value to the diversity that immigrants and their children bring to a country.Governance and Globalization
Children’s wellbeing will only happen, however, if governments consider them important regardless of class, ethnicity, sexual preference and other distinguishing characteristics. This can happen if the citizenry, including children, put pressure on officials to promote the priority actions they deserve. This means organized social movements in favor of and including children as central to human achievement. Transformational approaches will have to attack corruption and inefficiency. With birth rates continuing to decline, thereby raising implications for the labor force, the economic consequences of their relative scarcity vis-à-vis an aging population may transform current lukewarm thinking into serious concern for children and their future.Global governance must also recognize the emerging calls for a more just world by reformulating economic systems that prioritize human wellbeing ahead of uncontrolled profits. These growing humanitarian and social justice advocacies may gain the commitment of populations who have learned that “the new normal” cannot be a replication of the unacceptable “old normal” with a few frills added. Universal commitments to children mean triggering genuine transformational processes in the coming 25 years. Making that happen becomes the true test for UNICEF working with reform-oriented government, private sector and civil society partners.
This article is part of the XUNICEF News and Views Quarterly Newsletter, December 2021.
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