Attachments
Foreword
UNICEF is built on a foundation of hope. It is the hope that we can create a world in which the rights and well-being of this and future generations of children are protected and upheld. And hope is what fuels our optimism that this mission can be achieved.
But while hope is tremendously powerful, it can also be fragile, especially when it crashes up against the harshest realities our world has to offer. And last year was especially brutal for the world’s children.
In 2023, child rights were under attack in communities across the globe.
Many of the more than 450 million children living in or fleeing from conflict zones endured unimaginable suffering – their rights violated or denied. Over the course of the year, I met some of these children during my travels with UNICEF. Their suffering is an indictment of a world that fails to protect them from the dangers of war.
Making matters worse, in 2023, new and protracted conflicts coincided with other devastating crises, including disasters and public health emergencies. And climate change continued to wreak havoc on young lives, causing severe droughts, heatwaves and more intense storms.
Despite these challenges, UNICEF and our partners reached millions of children, women and families around the world with essential services and supplies, including in some of the hardest-to-reach places. And these achievements for children give me hope. For example, in 2023:
• UNICEF and our partners provided more than 210 million children with services for the early detection and treatment of child wasting, and through our new Community Health Delivery Partnership, we are ramping up progress towards health and nutrition even further.
• In a historic breakthrough for child survival, UNICEF delivered 6.2 million doses of the world’s first malaria vaccine to seven African countries.
• The UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage continued to advance gender equality, overcoming gender biases and empowering adolescent girls.
• At COP28, the COP recognized the impacts of climate change on children’s health and well-being for the first time, proposing an ‘expert dialogue’ in 2024 and strengthening the global goal on adaptation.
• UNICEF also introduced our Sustainability and Climate Change Action Plan (SCAP), a blueprint for safeguarding children’s rights to a clean, healthy and safe environment. And we expanded our work on sustainability, climate change adaptation and disaster risk mitigation.
Core Resources played a critical role in helping UNICEF achieve these results. Our organization depends on core resources to fund our country programmes and to meet the needs of children equitably. Yet they make up an insufficient proportion of our funding. This year, I hope we will work closely together to reverse this damaging trend. At the same time, we must stretch every dollar to achieve the greatest impact for children. As part of this effort, UNICEF is an active participant in joint UN efficiencies work, moving over 50 per cent of our offices to common premises and participating in other joint initiatives to position our resources and capacities optimally to be closer to the children we serve.
This coming September, the Summit of the Future offers a chance to reignite a shared sense of purpose among the international community.
UNICEF will push to have children recognized as a distinct group of rights-holders, and we will leverage the organization’s leadership role to make the case that upholding child rights and accelerating progress towards the child-related Sustainable Development Goals are indispensable to addressing current and future challenges.
Children and young people are our best hope for creating a better and more peaceful world. Let us be better and do more for them in 2024 and beyond.