UNICEF Emergency Response

Dear Friend,

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has spread to over 215 countries with over 461,700 reported deaths and 8.7 million confirmed cases. While children seem to be less vulnerable to COVID-19 itself, the collateral impact on children and their families is significant, with the impact disproportionally affecting poor and vulnerable children and families. Some 1.29 billion children in 186 countries – 73.8 percent of all enrolled students – are directly affected by national school closures. These closures have put the nutritional health of 370 million children at risk by depriving them of school meals. Sufficient water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services are essential for adequate infection prevention and control (IPC); however, across the world, 2.1 billion people lack access to safe water at home and 4.5 billion people lack access to safely managed sanitation.

With your generous support, UNICEF and partners achieved the following results:

• Reached over 1.6 billion people with COVID-19 messaging;
• Provided over 11.5 million people with critical WASH supplies;
• Shipped more than 6.6 million gloves, 1.3 million surgical masks and 428,069 N95 respirators,
• Reached over 79.8 million children with distance/home-based learning;
• Together with Microsoft, announced an expansion of the Learning Passport partnership to enable high-quality digital learning during the crisis; and
• Reached over 830,000 children, parents and/or caregivers with mental health support

Your continued contribution to these efforts allows UNICEF to prevent new infections through public health education and outreach; the scale up of alternative communications channels to help provide education and child protection services; key relevant support to health systems to help boost supplies of key equipment; and tackle misinformation that could have harmful effects on children.

Thank you for your continued partnership in support of UNICEF’s emergency response efforts. Your generous support allows UNICEF to remain flexible in times of crisis and provide support to children when it is needed most.

In Partnership,

Whitney