More children than ever before since the end of World War II have been uprooted to save themselves from armed conflict, violence and other crises in late 2021, according to a press release released today by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) from New York.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, some 36.5 million minors were forced to live away from home at the end of last year, 2.2 million more than in 2020. More specifically, 13.7 million were refugee children or pending asylum and 22.8 million were internally displaced, the statement said.
The sad record is due in particular to armed conflicts such as those in Afghanistan and Yemen, UNICEF said, while another 7.3 million children were left homeless last year due to natural disasters.
UNICEF calls on governments around the world to step up their protection of refugees and migrants, especially minors.
As these numbers go back to the end of last year, they do not include children from Ukraine who were left homeless or forced to flee their homeland due to the invasion of the Russian army.
An estimated 2 million children have been displaced and another 3 million have been displaced since the war began almost four months ago on February 24.
Children are being displaced by extreme weather events, such as the drought in the Horn of Africa, or the floods in India, Bangladesh and South Africa.
More than a third of uprooted children live in sub-Saharan Africa (3.9 million, 36%), a quarter in Europe and Central Asia (2.6 million, 25%) and more than one in ten (1.4 million, 13%) in the Middle East and North Africa, according to a UNICEF statement.
Nearly two-thirds of children living in exile go to school, but the same is true for only a third of teens, he said.
SOURCE: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ
Source: Capital
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