Global round up of some of the top good news stories for and about children.
Between 2000 and 2023, the number of children and adolescents not attending school fell by nearly 40 percent, according to the most recent UNESCO data. Better yet, as the global population of children has grown during this time, it makes the decrease in out-of-school children even more significant.
Since 2015, an additional 110 million children have entered school worldwide, and 40 million more young people are completing secondary school.
Eastern and Southern Africa has achieved gender parity in primary education, with 25 million more girls enrolled in primary school today than in the early 2000s.
Once at school, more and more children are benefitting from free school meals. Around 480 million students are now getting fed at school, up from 319 million before the pandemic, and 104 countries have joined a global coalition to promote school meals.
School feeding policies are now in place in 48 countries in Africa (out of 54), and this year Nigeria announced plans to expand school meals to 20 million children by 2025, while Kenya committed to expanding its program from two million to ten million children by the end of the decade.
On the other side of the world, Indonesia pledged to provide lunches to all 78 million of its students, in what will be the world's largest free school meals program.
In what might be this year's most invisible story of progress, a WHO-UNICEF report revealed that between 2015 and 2023, over 200 million children gained access to improved water, sanitation, or hygiene services at school.
In early November, while the eyes of the world were on the US election, an event took place that may prove to be a far more consequential for humanity. Five countries pledged to end corporal punishment in all settings, two more pledged to end it in schools, and another 12, including Bangladesh and Nigeria, accepted recommendations earlier in the year to end corporal punishment of children in all settings. In total in 2024, more than 100 countries made some kind of commitment to ending violence against children. Together, these countries are home to hundreds of millions of children, with the WHO calling the move a 'fundamental shift.'
After 17 years of campaigning by advocacy groups and eight failed legislative attempts, Colombia finally outlawed child marriage. Sierra Leone introduced new legislation that makes even witnesses to child marriages liable to imprisonment, and Zambia raised the minimum marriage age to 18 - a big step for a country with 1.7 million child brides.
This year UNICEF told us about one of the greatest human progress stories of all time: between 1990 and 2022, the number of young children in South Asia dying each year fell from five million to 1.3 million. In these nine countries (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) the probability that a child will die before the age of five has fallen by 62 percent since 2000. Those are staggering numbers, and well worth remembering the next time anyone insists the world was a better place a generation ago.
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