Why in News?

• ILO (International Labour Organization) and UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) has recently released a report titled- “More than a billion reasons: The urgent need to build universal social protection for children”, which states that just 1 in 4 children are shielded by social protection, leaving others exposed to poverty, exclusion and multidimensional deprivations.

Highlights

• Social protection is a universal human right and a precondition for a world free from poverty.
• It is also a vital foundation to help the world’s most vulnerable children fulfill their potential.Social protection helps increase access to food, nutrition, education and healthcare.
• It can help prevent child labour and child marriage and address the drivers of gender inequality and exclusion.It can also reduce stress and even domestic violence, while supporting household livelihoods.
• And by tackling monetary poverty directly, it can also mitigate the stigma and exclusion so many children living in poverty experience – and the pain that a childhood feeling “less than” can produce.
• 77 billion children aged 0-18 years lack access to a child or family cash benefit, a fundamental pillar of a social protection system.
• Children are twice as likely to live in extreme poverty as adults.
• Approximately 800 million children are subsisting below the poverty line of USD 3.20 a day, and 1 billion children are experiencing multidimensional poverty.
• Only 26.4% of children aged 0-15 years are shielded by social protection, leaving the remaining 73.6% exposed to poverty, exclusion and multidimensional deprivations.
• Globally, all 2.4 billion children need social protection to be healthy and happy
• Child and family social protection coverage rates fell or stagnated in every region in the world between 2016 and 2020, leaving no country on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of achieving substantial social protection coverage by 2030.
• In Latin America and the Caribbean, coverage fell significantly from approximately 51% to 42 %.In many other regions, coverage has stalled and remains low