The coronavirus1 pandemic is the biggest global upheaval of our age and will have profound implications across all countries and all areas of our lives. Despite being less at risk of severe illness caused directly by the disease, children are not exempt. Children alive today will forever be ‘the Covid Generation’, their lives deeply marked by its impacts. Their generation carries our hopes for a brighter future; but there is a real risk that – counter to Jebb’s vision – it is a generation that will be failed by the choices we make today.
Huge strides have been made over the last century in realising children’s rights. But the pandemic has created, exposed or exacerbated numerous challenges for children that, if unaddressed, could result in stalled progress or – at worst – a profound reversal of the gains that have been painstakingly won since Jebb wrote the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1923.
Children in every country in the world face immediate impacts: losing out on education, weakened healthcare provision, a looming nutrition crisis, damage to their mental health and diminished protection. In the medium term, this whole generation of children faces lost opportunity and a financial price to be paid as they grow into adulthood. In the long term, if humanity fails to find sustainable ways of organising itself, grievous harm will be done not only to this cohort of children, but to their children and to their children’s children.
The pandemic has been a stark reminder of our vulnerability as individuals, as societies and as a species. It is clear that recovery cannot mean a return to the status quo; the economic, political and social conditions that existed before the pandemic are part of what have given it such destructive force. They are too weak to be relied on as foundations for the future.
As we slowly emerge from the white heat of the crisis into a new normal, now is the time to agree how we want the world to look and to actively shape the response and the decade of recovery that follows. In this report, Save the Children argues that critical to the success of the post-pandemic settlement will be the extent to which it serves the interests of the Covid Generation, defending the historic progress in children’s rights made over the past century while seizing new opportunities to protect and advance the rights of future generations.