Children

• [New] An additional 10 million children globally could face acute malnutrition, with a doubling of the number of people facing acute food insecurity in 2020 relative to 2019.
• [New] Without determined and targeted action, African girls will be left behind as we step up efforts to achieve Africa's Agenda 2060 and Africa's Agenda for Children 2040.
• [New] An additional 6 to 7 million children under the age of 5 will suffer from wasting or acute malnutrition in 2020, a 14% rise that will translate into more than 10,000 additional child deaths per month - mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
• [New] Girls in South Asia are expected to be the hardest hit, from child marriage with almost 200,000 young women at risk in 2020.
• [New] In less than 15 years, the number of senior citizens will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history.
• [New] Ireland's funding supports efforts to provide access to education for 8.9 million children living in crisis by 2021, including over 4.4 million girls.
• [New] Over the next 30 years, in the US alone $30 trillion of wealth will be transferred from baby boomers to millennials and generation Z.
• As the US Baby Boom generation heads into retirement, immigrants and their children are expected to offset a decline in the working-age population by adding about 18 million people of working age between 2015 and 2035.
• Child Care Now says much more - and permanent - daycare funding will be needed: $10 billion a year in new Canadian federal spending within five years.
• An estimated 500,000 more girls around the world are at risk of being forced into child marriage in 2020 as a result of the effects of COVID-19.
• Nigeria would take over from India as the world capital for deaths of children under the age of five by 2021.
• The UNFPA has set three goals for women globally by 2030: ending unmet needs for family planning; ending gender-based violence, including child marriage; and ending all preventable maternal deaths.
• The ambitious targets in the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 provide us with a clear goal to reduce the numbers of children living in poverty in Scotland by 2023, and effectively eradicate child poverty by 2030.
• The Scottish Government is committed to achieving net zero by 2045, reducing child poverty to less than 10% of children living in relative poverty by 2030, and to building a wellbeing economy.
• Given that Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 aims to end all preventable deaths of newborns and children under the age of five by 2030, there is a need to identify simple, feasible and cost-effective interventions to reduce the magnitude of deaths due to pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria in LMICs.
• 2020 will be another peak year for cases of acute flaccid myelitis, an uncommon-but-serious neurological condition that affects mostly children.
• The number of malnourished children could reach 2.4 million by the end of the year in Yemen, a 20% increase.
• Nearly 10 million children could be forced out of education forever by the end of 2020 - and a $77 billion education funding gap for the world's poorest children.
• If global fertility rates decrease by just 0.5 children per woman, we will have 3.5 billion fewer people by 2100, lessening the impact of climate change.
• There are concerns that annual child poverty targets in Scotland will be missed amid forecasts by The Resolution Foundation that, without action, child poverty across the UK will rise between now and 2023/24 due to UK Government benefit reforms.

Last updated: 26 November 2020