Children and Youth
Acknowledgements
The Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024 (GLOTIP) was prepared by the UNODC Research Team on Trafficking in Persons and Smuggling of Migrants under the supervision of Jean-Luc Lemahieu Director of the Division for Policy Analysis and Public Affairs Angela Me Chief of the Research and Trend Analysis Branch (RAB) and the Research Coordinator on Trafficking in Persons and Smuggling of Migrants Fabrizio Sarrica.
Preface
The Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024 is a call to be alert and to act for the people being trafficked and exploited in today’s volatile context. After a marked decrease in the detection of victims during the COVID-19 pandemic the number of victims detected globally in 2022 increased sharply again and even surpassed pre-pandemic levels rising by 25% compared to 2019. This may partly be a reflection of improved detection capacity but it is likely also a reflection of the fragility we see in every corner of the globe.
Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024
The 2024 UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons is the eighth of its kind mandated by the General Assembly through the 2010 United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons. This edition of the Global Report provides a snapshot of the trafficking patterns and flows detected after the COVID-19 pandemic. It covers 156 countries and provides an overview of the response to the trafficking in persons at global regional and national levels by analyzing trafficking cases detected between 2020 and 2023. A major focus of this edition of the Report is Trafficking in Persons in the African continent.
Foreword
In a world facing so many present-day challenges one might ask why UNICEF is devoting this edition of The State of the World’s Children to the future specifically to the world in which children will live in 2050.
The State of the World’s Children 2024
The Future of Childhood in a Changing World
The future is now. The carbon we pour into our atmosphere today will shape the climate of the future. The technologies we develop today – and the policies we develop to govern them – will help shape how we learn work and communicate. They will affect the well-being of our children. The demographic trends of today will help shape the population patterns of societies tomorrow. So the future is now – we are laying its foundations today. It is important that we ask ourselves: What will be in that future? What will the world be like for children in 2050? And what can we do today to ensure the best possible future for every child? These are the questions at the heart of this year’s The State of the World’s Children report. We cannot know for certain what the future holds. But we can examine the forces and trends shaping our world today and reflect on how they might shape the future. No list of these elements can be complete; after all our world is complex and so are the forces and trends shaping it. For example in the years since the pandemic a collision of political social and economic trends has fuelled a global ‘polycrisis’ made up of intensifying challenges to democracy fragmentation in the multilateral system and a debt crisis which is “unsustainable and a recipe for social unrest” according to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. Important commitments on many of these issues were made at the United Nations Summit of the Future in September 2024. The Pact for the Future adopted at the Summit states that the success of future generations is contingent on “eliminating the intergenerational transmission of poverty and hunger inequality and injustice and acknowledging the special challenges faced by the most vulnerable countries.”
The future is ours to shape
The scenarios presented in this report show that considerable progress has been made over the last several decades which has improved children’s lives and will continue to do so in the future. Child survival life expectancy and education completion for example are expected to continue to improve across all three scenarios for the 2050s.
Three megatrends shaping childrens futures
To understand how the world’s children will live in 2050 we examine three forces that will shape their lives in the next quarter-century: demographic shifts the climate and environmental crises and frontier technologies.
Technical annex
Data and research in SOWC 2024 are drawn from multiple sources to explore the trends and forces shaping the lives of children in the future. These sources principally include UNICEF global databases interagency research papers peer-reviewed academic journals the World Bank and other United Nations organizations in particular World Population Prospects (WPP 2024) from the Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
Children in the world of 2050
The three megatrends explored in the previous chapter will continue to have acute impacts on children’s lives in the years to come but many other forces will also play a part.