Good Health and Well-Being

This brief highlights trends and impacts of COVID-19 (coronavirus) on women’s safety in transport. It includes examples of strategies put in place to provide safer transport modes for women and girls throughout the global pandemic, with a focus on availability, accessibility, and affordability, and makes recommendations on how different sectors can contribute to a comprehensive approach to improve women’s mobility. It draws upon the knowledge and experience of a wide range experts (for example, governments, grassroots women’s and women’s rights organizations, the private sector, and other partners), including those from cities participating in the UN Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces Global Flagship Initiative. It is a living document which forms part of the “EVAW COVID-19 briefs” series and will continue to be informed by the uptake of recommendations by multiple stakeholders in policy and programme action throughout different phases of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is entailing huge costs worldwide. To help developing countries formulate policy responses to minimize negative impacts of the COVID-19, possible size and duration of the shocks on most vulnerable countries, i.e., least developed countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS), and their resilience to overcome the shocks need to be assessed. This paper quantitatively examines possible paths of LDCs and SIDS recovering from the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, using an autoregressive model of income growth and a panel regression model of external demand for LDCs and SIDS. Evidence from the experience of the 2007-08 global financial crisis suggests that the income growth of LDCs and SIDS had not recovered to the level of pre-crisis rates even 5 years after the crisis. This suggests a slower recovery for many LDCs and SIDS, while developed economies were able to achieve a quick recovery. The magnitude of current COVID-19 crisis relative to previous shocks is unknown, and so the regression analysis suggested that, if income in advanced economies fell by 6 per cent in 2020 and bounced back in 2021, growth of per capita income in LDCs and SIDS may need about 4 to 5 years to be able to return to the projected path under the baseline scenario without the COVID-19 crisis. The actual speed and duration of recovery in LDCs and SIDS are likely to be slower and longer, considering other factors, such as additional impacts from shocks related to commodity prices and climate change.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every aspect of society. In mid-April 2020, 192 countries had closed their schools, putting 9 out of 10 enrolled children out of school. These closures disproportionately affected marginalized children, worsening existing inequities across education systems worldwide. This brief draws on the experience of five UNICEF education country programmes supported by the Let Us Learn (LUL) initiative, to document tangible lessons in adapting education programmes to support the most marginalized children during school and learning centre closures. The evidence in this brief stems from a series of semi-structured interviews with Education and Child Protection specialists, as well as a document review of available COVID-19 response studies, in the five LUL-supported UNICEF Country Offices.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most serious global public health and socioeconomic crisis the world has faced in the past century, exacerbating pre-existing and systemic inequalities and threatening the long-term livelihoods and well-being of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. Recovery trends between advanced and developing economies are deeply uneven, spurred by vast differences in access to vaccines, the fiscal capacity and ability of governments to respond, supply chain failures, a growing digital divide, the impacts of the growing complexity of conflict and displacement, and the threat of a looming debt crisis. This two-track recovery is now creating a great divergence, which, if not corrected, will undermine trust and solidarity and fuel conflict and forced migration, and make the world more vulnerable to future crises, including climate change.

The United States has never assured the human right to health, including the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health and access to all medical services. While there is some public financing of health care, mainly for older people and low-income children, the country largely relies on private health insurers and providers using a decentralized and lightly regulated market-based system. This publication focuses on the ways in which women have been impacted by the Affordable Care Act (usually referred to as ACA or ‘Obamacare’).

This work provides an in-depth analysis of trends in labour outcomes of women in India based on employment-unemployment surveys. The publication brings out the gender differentials that exist in the employment status of women and men despite the existence of legal and policy framework for the empowerment of women in the country. The labour force participation rates (LFPRs) of women are not only less than half those of men but also declined in 2011–2012. Age, marital status, presence of children, socio-religious status, area of residence, level of education and relative affluence of households are some of the determinants of labour force participation of women and men in India.

Nicaragua has the second-highest emigration rate in Central America, behind El Salvador, and 40 per cent of Nicaraguan households receive remittances. In contrast to migrants from other Central American countries, however, Nicaraguan migrants are more likely to move within the region to Costa Rica than to the United States. This paper is concerned specifically with the implications of migration within Central America for family life. Focusing on the case of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, the paper argues that the provision of care in Nicaraguan transnational families occurs in the context of multiple insecurities, both historical and contemporary. In this sense, migration represents both a solution to the insecure climate of care provision and a source of further insecurity. The paper frames this analysis within scholarship on the privatization of care work, caregiving in transnational families, and historical patterns of diverse family configurations. It then draws on more than 24 months of ethnographic research between 2009 and 2016, including interviews and participant observation with migrants living in Costa Rica and their families in Nicaragua, to show how Nicaraguan families develop strategies based on a history of informal and flexible caregiving. In particular, marriage informality and grandmother caregiving are highlighted. While these informal strategies allow families to navigate the challenges migration and family separation entail, they also contribute to continued vulnerability and reinforce the gendered burdens of caregiving within transnational families.

This paper presents a costing analysis for a set of family-friendly services and transfers: income protection for children, people of working age, and older persons; universal health coverage; and early childhood care and education and long-term care services. The social protection and care policies that are included in the costing have enormous significance for families and broader society, and their implementation would have particularly important impacts for women, since they are over-represented among those without income security, they face specific life course contingencies, and they take on a highly disproportionate share of unpaid care work. Previous work studied different components of this package more in depth, often also providing projections for the future. The comparative advantage of the present study is that it looks at an integrated package of family-friendly services and transfers and estimates the costs for a large sample of countries (151 to 166, depending on the scenario). The costing shows that such a package is affordable in many countries. Depending on the scenario, median costs range between 4.6 and 10.1 per cent of GDP. Those countries that cannot finance the full package can initially afford at least some of its critical elements, such as health care or income support.

Gender equality is one of the key challenges confronted by pension systems around the world. In a context of gendered labour markets, contributory pension systems face several constraints to guarantee universal and adequate pension benefits for women. Women’s life courses are characterized by longer periods dedicated to taking care of others, lower labour market participation, more part-time work and lower earnings. All these features compromise their pension entitlements in pension systems that link benefits to paid work, contributions and earnings. This publication deals with the challenges and constraints that pension systems face to be gender equitable and the policy alternatives to address these challenges. This work shows that crucial policy choices for the protection of women concern the conditions for entitlements in pension systems (based on either work, need or citizenship), the types of transfers that are promoted between women and men, the policy tools available to offset gender differences in paid work, earnings and unpaid work (such as contribution credits) and the protection of the most vulnerable social groups through redistributive benefits.

This paper examines the interplay between the obligations related to the ‘family’ that States have assumed through various human rights treaties adopted over the decades, and the recent commitments undertaken under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. International human rights instruments recognize the ‘family’ as the fundamental unit of society and include a variety of rights and obligations pertaining to the family. These obligations must be respected in all laws, policies and interventions pertaining to the family. Under the 2030 Agenda, States committed to achieving sustainable development in its three dimensions in a balanced and integrated manner. Through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and its 169 targets, the 2030 Agenda seeks to realize the human rights of all and to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. Given this context, this paper explores critical questions such as: If families have changed over time, what is a ‘family’ today? How do critical human rights principles such as equality and non-discrimination, the best interests of the child and the right to live a life free of violence shape the understanding of family? How should these human rights obligations guide the adoption of public policies that impact the family? How should policies and programmes ensure respect of the rights of all families, tailored to the diversity of families within a country?