Her name is Mary*. She’s from Benin City in Nigeria. When she was seventeen, Mary tried to escape a life with no prospects to work in a restaurant in Italy. Instead, she was set up to be trafficked into the sex industry. Her story is a story that UNICEF has heard again and again. It is a byproduct of a huge industry that has grown up… Read more →←
Topic: Experts speak
Water is elemental. Without it, nothing can grow. And without safe water, children may not survive. Children without access to safe water are more likely to die in infancy– and throughout childhood – from diseases caused by water-borne bacteria, to which their small bodies are more vulnerable. When these diseases don’t kill… Read more →←
No one is more vulnerable than a newborn baby. Newborns are totally dependent on their mothers. And their mothers, in turn, rely on skilled doctors and nurses, with access to working equipment, medicines, infrastructure, and information systems. When mothers give birth at home, without access to a skilled birth attendant, the chance that… Read more →←
I recently traveled to Gaziantep in southern Turkey, close to the Syrian border, because I wanted to see the situation for refugee children first-hand. Turkey is carrying a huge burden, helping with what is now the biggest refugee population in the world: nearly 2.8 million Syrian refugees, of which 1.2 million are child refugees.… Read more →←
What’s the most important thing children have? Their brains. And yet, we’re not caring for children’s brains the way we care for their bodies. This should concern all of us – including business leaders. The first 1,000 days of life – from conception to age three – open a critical and singular window of opportunity. During… Read more →←
It has been more than 160 years since the link between sewage-polluted drinking water and cholera was first established. And yet from December 2014 to August 2016, more than 17,000 people were hospitalized due to cholera in Kenya. It is a stark reminder that inequalities persist, and that sanitation and clean drinking water are still of… Read more →←
Scaling up an innovation for maximum use and maximum benefit is never easy. The road to success is bumpy, and good ideas inevitably stumble into barriers – especially when the purpose of the innovation is to improve children’s learning experiences. But innovation that can be effective, scaled up and replicated is precisely what is… Read more →←
Antimicrobial resistance, the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics and anti-microbial drugs, is an increasingly visible topic on the global health agenda. It poses an enormous threat to the global fight against disease, threatening to render ineffective many of the drugs we have used to fight infection since penicillin’s discovery… Read more →←
This blog post initially appeared in UNICEF’s new report on air pollution, Clear the Air for Children. It causes miscarriages, early delivery, and low birth weight. It contributes to diseases that account for almost 1 in 10 of all deaths of children under the age of five. It can harm the healthy development of children’s… Read more →←
The practice of hand washing is simple, so simple it sometimes goes unnoticed. Maybe it’s because it has rarely crosses people’s minds that our hands can serve as a reservoir for numerous microorganisms. They can be transmitted by direct contact with contaminated skin or objects, and through surfaces from contaminated environments,… Read more →←
