The COVID Pandemic Shocks, The Adolescents Girls, and the Labor Market (original) (raw)

Disability Inclusive Development Situational Analysis for Bangladesh

2020

This situational analysis (SITAN) addresses the question: “what is the current situation for persons with disabilities in Bangladesh?”. It has been prepared for the Disability Inclusive Development programme (which works on access to education, jobs, healthcare, and reduced stigma and discrimination for persons with disabilities in Bangladesh, Jordan, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, and Tanzania), to better understand the current context, including COVID-19, and available evidence in Bangladesh. It will be helpful for anyone interested in disability inclusion in Bangladesh, especially in relation to stigma, employment, education, health, and humanitarian issues.

Challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic in the health of women, children, and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean

2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has unexpectedly transformed the access and the organization of health services for an indeterminate time, circumventing the efforts made in recent years to improve women, children, and adolescent health indicators in Latin America and the Caribbean. In most countries, the segmentation of health services, the concentration of human resources and medical technology in some urban hospitals, the under-financing of primary health care and epidemiological surveillance, and the lack of coordination between the different levels of care weaken the coordination of national response actions. Maintaining essential health services for women, children, and adolescents while mitigating the pandemic's impact represents an unprecedented challenge. This report presents estimates of the effects of the reduction of health services coverage on achieving or maintaining the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development's Goal 3 targets-reducing maternal, neonatal, and under-5 mortality and guaranteeing universal access to sexual and reproductive health services. The pandemic and its response make it challenging to reach or sustain these targets, even though the region was well on track to achieve them. Urgent priorities oriented towards achieving women, children, and adolescent health equity during and after the pandemic require to 1) increase public spending on health and social policies to control the pandemic and to favor social and economic reactivation and reconstruction, 2) restore and rebuild essential health services, and 3) strengthen the primary health care strategy.

Exploring educational lives of the excluded youth under COVID-19 in the SADC region

2020

COVID-19 effectively put a stop to learning in schools and working in the informal sector. The internet and social media are full of stories of how the young are successfully responding to the pandemic but not much is known on the marginalized young people and how their exclusion status is further aggravated by COVID-19. Particular attention will be paid to the gender factor in understanding the types of exclusion. By documenting selected life stories of the excluded (in school and out school), this piece of research aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of exclusion among the youth amidst COVID-19. Using a biographical approach, the researchers will be able to come up with a profile of the excluded youth and their survival and resilient mechanisms such as social movement-building, and/or strategies to obtain assistance from existing institutions/originations.

IMPACT OF COVID19 CRISIS ON LIVES OF VULNERABLE CHILDREN IN INDIA: A SOCIOECONOMIC ANALYSIS AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

The outbreak of pandemic COVID19 has challenged the existing system of functioning across the world and made us realize that change coined as “new normal” is inevitable to smoothen our lives. While imposition of lock down is a necessary step to curb the spread of the COVID19 infection and to lessen the burden on the existing health infrastructure, this has substantial adverse socioeconomic effect on India and rest of the world. Child exploitation in the form of frequent incidents of child marriages and child labour are some significant yet less studied external effects of epidemic or pandemic. Using latest, relevant reports and articles by national and international agencies, this paper highlights the adverse effect of pandemic COVID19 on vulnerable children in the form of child labour and child marriages; its associated socioeconomic consequences for the years to come, recent government policies to combat such social evils followed by effective suggestions. Furthermore, this article draws an analogy between the incidence of increasing school drop-outs and exploitation of children during and post Ebola pandemic in African countries and the increasing similar situation of India during the COVID19 pandemic and the likelihood of missing children from schools in post-lockdown years.

COVID 19 Pandemic and Adolescent Girls A West African Perspective

WACSI Op-Eds, 2020

These times are not normal times! We are in difficult times! This too shall pass! We are all in this together! These are recurring assuring statements made by governments to citizens to conscientise them on how terrifying the COVID-191 threat is to humankind and the need for a resolve to work together to combat this threat. To avert untold disasters, as was the case of the Ebola outbreak , national governments in most countries have announced a raft of measures to curb the spread of the virus. Evidence from past crises and natural disasters suggests that confinement measures often lead to increased or first-time violence against women and children. It was reported that amidst school closures during the West African Ebola epidemic, rates of child labour, neglect, sexual abuse, and adolescent pregnancies spiked, and many girls never returned to school It is therefore evident that the emergence of pandemics affects women, men, girls and boys differently. However, adolescent girls are affected greatly during crises. Their education is cut; they are likely to be exposed to health risks, violence and abuse, promiscuous lifestyles, burdened with care and house duties amongst others. Hence, such threats to the socio-economic wellbeing of adolescent girls in West Africa need to be addressed with utmost caution and attention to ensure that the post-COVID-19 effects are not disastrous for adolescent girls in the region. Read more WACSI Op-Eds here:https://www.wacsi.org/opeds.php Read more WACSI Issues Papers here:https://www.wacsi.org/issue\_papers.php Read more WACSI Research Reports here: https://www.wacsi.org/research\_reports.php

Justice for All and the Economic Crisis

Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, Justice in a Pandemic - Briefing Two: Justice for All and the Economic Crisis (New York: Center on International Cooperation, 2020), 2020

The Social and Economic Effects of Covid-19 on Children in North Macedonia: Rapid Analysis and Policy Proposals

2020

The pandemic caused by the global spread of the coronavirus Covid-19 is harming social, educational and health wellbeing of children, with the most vulnerable being hit the hardest. Children are being impacted directly, through school, extra-curricular and childcare facilities closures, social distancing and confinement, which puts a heavy burden on their educational, cognitive and emotional development, with the risk of increasing their anxiety and stress levels. Children are also being impacted indirectly, through the reduction of household incomes, which reduces their material and social wellbeing, impairs access to social and healthcare, while also exposing the hardest hit to risks malnutrition. It is critical to understand that the negative impact of the Covid-19 crisis may be particularly strong for some groups of children including those living in poverty, children with disabilities, children deprived of parental care, children in detention and so on. Furthermore, negative impacts of this scale may extend well beyond the short term spreading childhood poverty across many childhood years or beyond.