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An open letter to the earth'south children

8 reasons why I'grand worried, and hopeful, about the next generation.

Dearest children of today and of tomorrow,

Thirty years ago, against the backdrop of a changing world order – the autumn of the Berlin Wall, the decline of apartheid, the nascence of the world broad web – the globe united in defense force of children and babyhood. While virtually of the world'south parents at the fourth dimension had grown up under dictatorships or failing governments, they hoped for better lives, greater opportunities and more rights for their children. Then, when leaders came together in 1989 in a moment of rare global unity to brand a celebrated delivery to the world'due south children to protect and fulfil their rights, there was a real sense of hope for the next generation.

Then how much progress have nosotros made? In the three decades post-obit the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Kid, in spite of an exploding global population, we have reduced the number of children missing out on primary school past near forty per cent. The number of stunted children under 5 years of historic period dropped by over 100 one thousand thousand. 3 decades ago, polio paralyzed or killed almost 1,000 children every 24-hour interval. Today, 99 per cent of those cases have been eliminated. Many of the interventions behind this progress – such as vaccines, oral rehydration salts and amend nutrition – have been applied and cost-effective. The rise of digital and mobile technology and other innovations have made it easier and more than efficient to deliver disquisitional services in difficult-to reach communities and to expand opportunities.

Nevertheless poverty, inequality, discrimination and altitude continue to deny millions of children their rights every twelvemonth, as 15,000 children under 5 nonetheless dice every mean solar day, by and large from treatable diseases and other preventable causes. We are facing an alarming ascension in overweight children, but too girls suffering from anaemia. The stubborn challenges of open defecation and kid marriage continue to threaten children's health and futures. Whilst the numbers of children in school are higher than ever, the challenge of achieving quality education is non being met. Being in school is non the aforementioned equally learning; more than 60 per cent of primary schoolhouse children in developing countries still neglect to attain minimum proficiency in learning and half the world'south teens face violence in and around schoolhouse, so information technology doesn't feel like a identify of prophylactic. Conflicts continue to deny children the protection, wellness and futures they deserve. The list of ongoing kid rights challenges is long.

And your generation, the children of today, are facing a new set of challenges and global shifts that were unimaginable to your parents. Our climate is changing beyond recognition. Inequality is deepening. Technology is transforming how we perceive the world. And more families are migrating than ever before. Childhood has changed, and nosotros need to alter our approaches forth with it.

Then, equally we wait dorsum on thirty years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we should also wait ahead, to the adjacent 30 years. We must heed to yous – today'south children and young people – nearly the bug of greatest business concern to you now and begin working with you on 20-first century solutions to twenty-first century bug.

With that in mind, here are eight reasons why I'm worried for your hereafter, and eight reasons why I think there is hope:

Why I'one thousand worried:

It sounds obvious that all children demand these basics to sustain healthy lives – a clean environment to live in, clean air to exhale, water to drink and nutrient to swallow – and it sounds strange to be making this point in 2019. Yet climatic change has the potential to undermine all of these basic rights and indeed most of the gains made in kid survival and evolution over the past thirty years. There is perchance no greater threat facing the rights of the adjacent generation of children.

The Food and Agronomics Organisation noted last twelvemonth that climatic change is becoming a key strength behind the recent continued rise in global hunger, and as escalating droughts and flooding dethrone food product, the next generation of children will conduct the greatest burden of hunger and malnutrition. We are already seeing testify of extreme weather events driven past climate change creating more frequent and more subversive natural disasters, and while future forecasts vary, according to the International System for Migration, the nearly oftentimes cited number of ecology migrants expected worldwide past 2050 is 200 one thousand thousand, with estimates as high as 1 billion.

Equally temperatures increase and water becomes scarcer it is children who will experience the deadliest impact of waterborne diseases. Today, more than than one-half a billion children alive in areas with extremely high flood occurrence and well-nigh 160 million in high-drought severity zones. Regions similar the Sahel, which are especially reliant on agriculture, grazing and line-fishing, are especially vulnerable to the effects of climatic change. In this arid region, rains are projected to go even shorter and less predictable in the future, and alarmingly, the region is warming upwards at a rate one and a half times faster than the global boilerplate. In the Sahel, the climate gets hotter and the poor become poorer, and it is all too common for armed groups to exploit the social grievances that arise under such pressurized conditions.

These challenges volition just be compounded by the impact of air pollution, toxic waste and groundwater pollution damaging children's health. In 2017 approximately 300 million children were living in areas with the most toxic levels of outdoor air pollution – six or more times college than international guidelines, and it contributes to the deaths of around 600,000 children nether the age of 5. Even more will suffer lasting damage to their developing brains and lungs.

And, past 2040, one in four children will live in areas of extreme h2o stress and thousands will be made sick by polluted water. The management and protection of clean, plentiful, accessible groundwater supplies, and the direction of plastic waste matter are very fast condign defining child wellness issues for our fourth dimension.

Why in that location is hope:

To mitigate climatic change, governments and business must work together to tackle the root causes by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Understanding. Meanwhile, nosotros must requite the highest priority to efforts to detect adaptations that reduce environmental impacts on children.

UNICEF works to adjourn the impact of extreme weather events including past designing water systems that can withstand cyclones and saltwater contamination; strengthening school structures and supporting preparedness drills; and supporting community health systems. Innovations such as Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) schemes – if deployed at calibration – could preserve reservoirs of clean water to protect millions of children from the dangers of water scarcity and disease.

Fifty-fifty in complex environments like the Sahel, there is promise – information technology has a immature population, hungry for work and opportunity, and the climate offers vast potential for harnessing renewable, sustainable energy sources. With investment in education and employment opportunities, improved security and governance, there is every reason to feel optimism for the region'south ability to develop climatic change resilience and adaptation.

To turn the tide on air pollution, governments and business concern must work hand in hand to reduce fossil fuel consumption, develop cleaner agricultural, industrial and transport systems and invest in scaling renewable free energy sources. Many governments have taken action to curb pollution from power plants, industrial facilities and road vehicles with strict regulations. A 2011 study past the United States Environmental Protection Bureau institute that the country's 1990 Make clean Air Act had delivered United states of america$30 of health benefits to citizens for every United states$one spent. Such policies hold the key to protecting little lungs and babies' brains from damaging airborne pollutants and particulate thing.

In the concurrently, information technology is vital that we search for solutions that tin can improve the worst effects of air pollution on kid health. Mongolia'southward capital city Ulaanbaatar has amid the most polluted air in the earth during winter. The biggest source of pollution comes from coal-burning used by 60 per cent of Ulaanbaatar's population. UNICEF innovation experts together with the customs, government, academia and the individual sector have begun to pattern and implement energy efficiency solutions for traditional homes to reduce coal consumption and ameliorate air quality, including by designing "the 21st Century Ger".

And we are finding ways to recycle and reuse plastics in innovative means every bit well, reducing toxic waste matter and putting rubbish to good utilize. Conceptos Plasticos, a Colombian social enterprise, has developed a technique to make bricks out of non-PVC plastics that are cheaper, lighter and more durable than conventional bricks – and is using them to build classrooms. Africa's first recycled plastic classroom was built before this year in Côte d'Ivoire, in simply a few weeks. It toll xxx per cent less than traditional classrooms. This innovative approach of transforming plastic waste into structure bricks has the potential to turn a plastic waste management challenge into an opportunity, by addressing the right to an education with the construction of schools, empowering these communities and cleaning up the surroundings at the same time.

Why I'm worried:

Children have always been the first victims of war. Today, the number of countries experiencing conflict is the highest it has ever been since the adoption of the Child Rights Convention in 1989. One in four children at present live in countries affected past fierce fighting or disaster, with 28 million children driven from their homes by wars and insecurity. Many lose several years of schoolhouse – every bit well as records of achievements and qualifications for future learning and careers. Conflicts and natural disasters take already disrupted learning for 75 million children and young people, many of whom have migrated beyond borders or been displaced. That is a personal tragedy for every single child. To abandon the aspirations of a whole generation is a terrible waste of human being potential. Worse, creating a lost, disillusioned and angry generation of uneducated children is a unsafe chance that could cost us all.

Why at that place is hope:

Some states take demonstrated constructive policies to keep refugees learning. When large numbers of children escaping the war in the Syria arrived in Lebanon, the government faced the challenge of accommodating hundreds of thousands of children in a public-school system already under strain. With the back up of international partners, they turned that challenge into an opportunity and integrated refugee children into schools while strengthening the instruction system for Lebanese students at the same time.

And digital innovations tin help us do more. UNICEF is collaborating with Microsoft and the Academy of Cambridge to develop a 'learning passport' – a digital platform that will facilitate learning opportunities for children and young people inside and beyond borders. The learning passport is existence tested and piloted in countries hosting refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons. A digitally inclusive world should permit young people, no affair their state of affairs, to get access to education. Scaling up solutions similar the digital learning passport could aid millions of displaced children proceeds the skills they need to thrive.

Why I'm worried:

If we believed everything we read about teenagers today, and the images portrayed in television and film, we could be forgiven for thinking they are a wild, antisocial bunch. Nevertheless nothing could exist further from the truth. The evidence actually shows that teens today smoke less, drink less, get into less problem and more often than not take fewer risks than previous generations. You might fifty-fifty call them Generation Sensible.

Nevertheless there is 1 area of risk for adolescents showing an extremely worrisome tendency in the wrong direction – i that reminds us of the invisible vulnerability that young people notwithstanding deport inside of them. Mental health disorders among nether 18s take been ascent steadily over the past 30 years and depression is now amid the leading causes of disability in the young. The World Health Arrangement (WHO) estimates that 62,000 adolescents died in 2016 because of self-damage, which is now the tertiary leading cause of death for adolescents aged 15 –19.

This is not just a rich country problem – WHO estimates that more than 90 per cent of adolescent suicides in 2016 were in low or middle-income countries. And while young people with severe mental disorders in lower-income countries often miss out on treatment and support, there is no country in the world that can claim to have conquered this challenge. To quote the WHO's mental health skillful Shekhar Saxena, "when information technology comes to mental health, all countries are developing countries." With well-nigh depression-income and eye-income countries spending less than 1 per cent of their total health budget on mental health, and high-income countries just iv–5 per cent, it is articulate that it needs greater priority around the world.

UNICEF works with children who have suffered unthinkable traumas, gender discrimination, extreme poverty, sexual violence, inability and chronic illness, living through conflict and other experiences that identify them at high risk of mental distress. The cost is not only personal, information technology is societal – the Earth Economic Forum consistently ranks mental wellness equally having i of the greatest economical burdens of whatever not-communicable health issue. Despite this overwhelming prove of a looming crunch and the alarming trends in rising cocky-harm and suicide rates, boyish mental health and well-being have often been overlooked in global health programming.

Why there is promise:

With half of lifetime mental health disorders starting before age 14, age-appropriate mental wellness promotion, prevention and therapeutic treatment and rehabilitation must be prioritized. Early on detection and treatment are key to preventing episodes of mental distress reaching a crisis betoken and precious young lives existence damaged and lost. Simply all besides oft, what stands in the style of immature people seeking help at an early on stage is the ongoing stigma and taboo that prevents communities talking openly nearly mental health problems. Fortunately, this taboo is starting time to fall, and immature people, in one case over again, are leading the way – founding non-governmental organizations, developing apps, raising sensation, and beingness song nearly their own struggles with mental illness and their efforts to accost their condition, in hope that others feel empowered to practise the same.

UNICEF uses campaigns in schools to promote open discussion virtually mental health. For example, in Republic of kazakhstan, which has one of the highest suicide rates among adolescents worldwide, UNICEF stepped upwards efforts to improve the mental well-being of adolescents through a large-calibration pilot programme in over 450 schools. The plan raised awareness, trained staff to place loftier-chance cases, and ensured referral of vulnerable adolescents to wellness specialists. Nearly 50,000 young people participated in the pilot with many significant improvements in well-being. The programme has since been scaled up to over 3,000 schools.

The prioritization of adolescent mental health promotion and suicide prevention has resulted in a 51 per cent decrease of self-injury mortality in the xv –17 years age group at the national level and the number of suicide cases decreased from 212 in 2013 to 104 in 2018 for this age group. And perhaps nearly importantly, mental health is at present being integrated into mainstream chief health care services, helping to overcome the stigma which often puts young people off from seeking help.

Why I'm worried:

Migration has been office of the human experience throughout history. For thousands of years, children and families have left their place of birth to settle in new communities in search of educational or employment opportunities. Today is no different. We live in a mobile world in which at least xxx million children have moved across borders.

For many, migration is propelled by a drive for a improve life. But for besides many children, migration is not a positive choice merely an urgent necessity – they simply do non have the opportunity to build a safe, healthy and prosperous life in the place they are born. When migration is driven by desperation, it can atomic number 82 to children migrating without the legal permissions they demand, becoming so-called 'irregular migrants'. They often take perilous journeys across deserts, oceans and armed borders, encountering violence, abuse and exploitation on the way.

And one of the greatest migrations the world has always seen is happening not across borders, just within borders, with millions migrating internally from rural to urban areas. In 1989, when the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted, the majority of the world's children lived in rural areas. Today the majority alive in cities, and the urbanization rate is set to grow. Though urban residents on average enjoy improve access to services and opportunities, inequalities can be so big that many of the nigh disadvantaged children in urban areas fare worse than children in rural areas. For example, the poorest urban children in 1 in 4 countries are more likely to die earlier their 5th birthday than the poorest children in rural areas. And the poorest urban children in 1 in vi countries are less likely to consummate primary school than rural children.

Why there is hope:

No child should feel forced to migrate from their home, yet until the root causes are addressed, the state of affairs is unlikely to change. That means tackling community and gang violence, strengthening protection systems and so children can be safety in their communities, improving admission to quality education and task opportunities, and making certain young people accept the take chances to gain the skills they demand to build meliorate – and safer – futures for themselves and their home countries.

UNICEF estimates that tens of thousands of children exercise migrate without legal permission, some with family unit and some alone, making them extremely vulnerable. It is essential that child migrants – legal or otherwise – have their rights upheld. Wherever they are, and whatever their story, migrant children are children get-go and foremost. Governments can protect kid migrants by prioritizing the all-time interests of children in the application of immigration laws, and wherever possible, they must proceed families together and use proven alternatives to detention, such as foster families or group homes – many governments are testing such approaches successfully.

The so-called urban advantage breaks downward when we look beyond averages and control for wealth, then social policies and programmes designed to support child survival and development must pay greater attention to the poorest and near marginalized urban children. Modern cities generally offer better access to make clean water, health and social services, and educational opportunities. Thus, if city governments can work to create inclusive access and equality of opportunity for the children in their cities, urban life could indeed provide a boost for child survival and development.

Why I'grand worried:

Every child has a right to a legal identity, to nativity registration and a nationality. But a quarter of you born today – almost 100,000 babies – may never have an official nascence certificate or qualify for a passport. If your parents are stateless, from a persecuted or marginalized community, or simply if you live in a poor remote region, you may never be given an identity or birth document. Yous may fifty-fifty be denied citizenship or accept your citizenship stripped from you lot. This lack of formal recognition by whatsoever country means you may be denied wellness care, education and other regime services. Subsequently in life, the lack of official identification can mean you enter into spousal relationship, dangerous work, or get conscripted into the military before the legal age. Every bit an unregistered or 'stateless' child, you are invisible to the authorities – it'south as if you never existed.

For example, in the makeshift camps in People's republic of bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugee families take fled seeking sanctuary, babies are built-in every twenty-four hours. A Rohingya baby is unlikely to have their birth registered and accept a nationality conferred upon them, robbing them of this bones 'passport to protection' from the very start of life.

And there is some other group of children today facing the threat of life without a clear legal identity and beingness left stateless. If y'all are an innocent child born to a foreign fighter from an armed grouping, you may not have citizenship, or yous may have your citizenship stripped from you. In the Syrian Arab Republic alone, UNICEF estimates that at that place are shut to 29,000 foreign children, most of them under the age of 12, and an additional 1,000 children believed to exist in Iraq, who may accept no civil documentation. They are at hazard of becoming stateless and invisible.

Why at that place is promise:

Registering children at birth is the first step in securing their recognition earlier the law, safeguarding their rights, and ensuring that any violation of these rights does non go unnoticed. The United nations has ready a goal that every human being being on the planet will have a legal identity by 2030. UNICEF is supporting governments to work towards this goal, starting with registering all births.

For some children denied an official identity considering of disagreements over their legal condition, the only existent solution is a political one. UNICEF urges Fellow member States to fulfil their responsibilities to protect everyone nether the age of 18 in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This includes children who are born to nationals from other states, who may be migrants, refugees or foreign fighters – considering children are children showtime and foremost.

In other circumstances, engineering and innovative partnerships promise a way forwards. In the Plurinational Land of Bolivia, for instance, TIGO – a nationwide telecommunications company – the Electoral High Tribunal and UNICEF worked to increase birth registration in hospitals and health centres, resulting in registration at birth increasing by more than 500 per cent between 2015 and 2018. In Rwanda, the automated registering of children at birth in hospitals led to nascency registration increasing from 67 per cent in 2017 to 80.2 per cent in 2018. We must urgently calibration upward programmes like this to reach more than children. This means dramatically expanding digital access to the almost remote and vulnerable communities, so registration systems tin happen in existent-fourth dimension.

Why I'm worried:

In that location are more than ane.viii billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world, 1 of the largest cohorts in human history. Too oftentimes, they lack access to an education that will prepare them for contemporary job and business opportunities – giving them the skills and outlook they demand for a twenty-first century economic system. Meanwhile, in the by xxx years, relative income inequality between countries has reduced, but absolute income inequality has increased significantly, and so that some children and families with low incomes are left behind and miss out on the opportunities their richer peers enjoy. Moreover, mobility has stalled over the last 30 years, miring another generation in a poverty trap determined entirely by the family she or he is born into.

Why there is promise:

UNICEF and our global partners have launched a new initiative to gear up young people to become productive and engaged citizens. Generation Unlimited aims to ensure every young person is in school, learning, training or employed by 2030. One programme in Argentina connects rural students in remote areas with secondary school teachers, both in person and online. An initiative in South Africa chosen TechnoGirl gives immature women from disadvantaged backgrounds job-shadowing opportunities in the STEM fields. And in People's republic of bangladesh, tens of thousands of immature people are receiving training in trades such as mobile-phone servicing. Through our Youth Challenge, we are bringing together bright young minds to solve issues in their communities, because young people are experts in their own lives and experiences. The Generation Unlimited Youth Challenge has worked with more than 800 innovators across 16 countries and produced innovative solutions such as the SpeakOut mobile app, developed by immature people in North Macedonia equally an anonymous way to reach out to peers for help with bullying, and The Red Code, a self-sustaining micro-entrepreneurial scheme from Pakistan, which helps young women with both menstrual hygiene direction and income generation.

Why I'm worried:

The globe wide web was born in the same year equally the Convention on the Rights of the Kid, xxx years ago. Today it has radically changed the world and reshaped childhood and adulthood akin. More than than i in iii children globally are thought to be regular users of the internet, and every bit this generation grows up, that proportion is ready to grow and abound.

Debates about the benefits and dangers of social media for children are becoming familiar, and more action to protect children from bullying and exposure to harmful content is certainly needed. Parent and children are also becoming aware of the risk of sharing too much personal data on social media. But the truth is, the information contained within social media profiles created by children are only the tip of the information iceberg. Less well understood simply at least as important, is the enormous accumulation of data being collected about children. As children go about their daily online lives, browsing social media, using search engines, e-commerce and government platforms, playing games, downloading apps and using mobile geolocation services, a digital footprint equanimous of thousands of pieces of data is accumulating around them. Some of the data may fifty-fifty have been gathered before birth and certainly before children are able to knowingly consent to its collection and utilize.

The era of and then-chosen 'big data' has the potential to transform – for the better – the provision of efficient, personalized and responsive services to children, but it also has potential negative impacts on their prophylactic, privacy, autonomy and future life choices. Personal data created during babyhood may be shared with third parties, traded for profit or used to exploit young people – particularly the about vulnerable and marginalized. Meanwhile, identity thieves and hackers accept exploited vulnerabilities in east-commerce platforms to defraud and exploit adults and children akin; search engines rails users' behaviour regardless of their age, and authorities surveillance of online activeness is increasingly sophisticated around the world. Moreover, data collected during babyhood accept the potential to influence future opportunities, such as admission to finance, education, insurance and wellness care. The relationship between information collection and usage, consent and privacy is circuitous enough for adults, but it is doubly then for children, since the internet has never been designed with children'southward rights and needs in mind, and few are equipped to navigate the complexities of data sharing and privacy control.

Too often, children exercise non know what rights they have over their ain data and exercise non understand the implications of their information use, and how vulnerable it can leave them. Privacy terms and conditions on social media platforms are oft barely understood past highly educated adults, permit alone children. An analysis from The New York Times, showed that many social media privacy policies require a reading comprehension level that exceeds that of the average college educatee, pregnant many users, especially the very young, are probably consenting to things they can't fully understand.

Why there is hope:

The challenge facing us all today is to ensure that we design systems that maximize the positive benefits of big data and artificial intelligence, while preserving privacy, providing protections from harm and empowering people – including children – to do their rights. And we are starting time to come across activity: governments are strengthening regulatory frameworks; individual sector providers are recognizing their role; and educators are thinking about how to equip children with the tools to navigate the online earth safely. It is a start.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child makes it clear that children have a specific right to privacy and in that location is no reason this should non apply online. Contextualizing children'due south right to privacy within the total range of their other rights, best interests and evolving capacities, it is evident that children's privacy differs both in telescopic and application from adults' privacy and there is a potent argument that children should be offered fifty-fifty more robust protection.

Where children use social media they need to take real opt-in or opt-out opportunities in relation to how their data are used by the provider or other commercial interests, and the terms and atmospheric condition demand to be clear and understandable to children. As some children have argued themselves, this might extend to deleting historical social media profiles for example. Where information is collected about children through tracking their online behaviours, it is crucial that clear, transparent and accessible privacy policies are made available and so that children have a better chance of offering informed consent, tin can understand their rights and know what the intended usage of the collected data is. Equipping immature people with the noesis and skills to merits their digital rights is essential.

Private sector internet service providers and social media platforms have a crucial role to play in strengthening protections for children. They must develop transparent, ethical standards and implement heightened scrutiny and protection for the total range of data concerning children, including information on children'due south location and browsing habits and especially regarding their personal information.

And some new regulatory frameworks, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), represent a promising effort at progress. The European union GDPR says that internet users, including children, have the correct to be provided with a transparent and clear privacy find, which explains how their data volition exist processed, that they should exist able to get a copy of their personal information and have wrong information about them rectified.

Global Pulse is a United Nations initiative that explores how new, digital data sources and existent-time analytics technologies tin can provide a better understanding of changes in human well-being and emerging vulnerabilities, with the potential to support development. Responding to legitimate concerns most privacy and information protection, in consultation with privacy experts, Global Pulse has developed a set of privacy principles which ensure transparency nearly the purpose of data apply, protect private privacy, admit the need for proper consent for utilize of personal information and respect a reasonable expectation of privacy, while making all reasonable efforts to forbid whatsoever unlawful and unjustified re-identification of individuals.

Why I'm worried:

Every child has the right to actively participate in their societies, and for many of you, your first experiences of borough date volition exist online. However, the majority of you will grow upwardly as natives of a digital environment that is saturated with misinformation so-called 'false news,' which undermines trust and engagement with institutions and information sources. Studies indicate that many children and young people today have a hard fourth dimension distinguishing fact from fiction online and as a event, your generation is finding it more difficult to know who and what to trust.

A United Kingdom Parliament-backed Committee on Simulated News, run in partnership with Facebook, Start News and The Day, institute that merely a quarter of the children reading online news actually trust the sources they are reading. It is tempting to meet this equally a positive sign of salubrious critical thinking skills at work, but the same study as well establish that just 2 per cent of children and immature people in the Great britain have the critical literacy skills they need to tell if a news story is real or imitation. Worryingly, about two thirds of teachers said they believe fake news is harming children's well-being by increasing levels of anxiety and skewing children's' world view. And a study in the United States on schools from 12 states of the U.s.a. assessing 'civic online reasoning' – or the power to gauge the credibility of online information – found that when evaluating information on social media, children and young people are hands duped.

We know the impact of misinformation is pernicious and has real-earth impacts. For case, thousands of the electric current generation of parents have been misled by misinformation spread through social media and mobile messaging apps about the safety of vaccines, prompting a wave of vaccine hesitancy and a worrisome resurgence of measles in high- and low-income countries alike, including France, India and the Philippines.

Misinformation campaigns have duped children into handing over money, giving away their data and beingness groomed and exploited for sex activity. And in the past few years, we've seen how misinformation can skew democratic debate, voter intentions, and sow doubt about other ethnic, religious or social groups – creating division and unrest. This is a global issue, with reports emerging from countries as various equally Brazil, Ukraine and the U.s. where  sophisticated disinformation campaigns have necessitated the educational activity of 'Learn to Discern' classes in schools. And in Myanmar, it has been declared that a misinformation campaign played a role in inciting horrific violence against the Rohingya minority.

This is only the tip of the post-truth iceberg. As the technology to deceive improves, and verifying content becomes more difficult, the potential for lowered trust in institutions and social discord grows exponentially. For case, with sophisticated video manipulation applied science using AI-generated synthetic media, it is becoming easier to distort and manipulate reality, making it seem as though individuals have said things they have not, in so-chosen 'deep fakes'. If these technologies advance, with no mitigating action to assistance the next generation root out fakes, they have the potential to fundamentally undermine confidence in scientific discipline and medicine, erode core institutions and beliefs, divide communities, and pose a grave threat to our democracies.

We can no longer rest on the naïve assurance that truth has an innate upper hand confronting falsehood in the digital era, and so nosotros must, as societies, build resilience against the daily deluge of falsity online. We should start past equipping young people with the ability to sympathize who and what they tin can trust online, so they can become active, engaged citizens.

Why there is promise:

There is some evidence to advise that adults should identify their trust in children and immature people not to fall for fakes. A recent research report published by the American Association for the Advancement of Scientific discipline found that social media users over 65 shared virtually seven times as many articles from imitation news domains every bit the youngest age group. While the reasons for this are equally withal unexplained, it may betoken that a higher level of digital and media literacy among 'digital natives' acts as a protective filter. All the same, information technology is clear we demand to work harder to set savvy young citizens to resist manipulation and retain a trusting connection to reliable and verifiable information and institutional knowledge.

While social media platforms appear to exist serious in their attempts to combat misinformation and work with news organizations to clearly label trusted sources, we cannot rely on the supply side for solutions. Children accept a right to an education that prepares them for the world they will live in, and today, this includes much improved digital and media literacy, critical thinking and weighing up evidence. The Director of the Organisation for Economical Co-operation and Development is including questions about distinguishing what is truthful from what is not true in the next circular of the influential international PISA tests, seeing critical judgment equally a global competency, and similar initiatives could assist to mainstream teaching and training in digital literacy skills that could be amidst the most of import for the next generation. Moreover, nosotros must work hard to build meaningful connections betwixt immature people and institutions, rebuilding trust, if we are to preserve democratic societies in the future.

A final discussion...

Finally, the biggest reason for hope is because you lot – the children and young people of today – are taking the lead on enervating urgent activeness, and empowering yourselves to learn about, and shape the earth around you. You are taking a stand now, and we are listening.

Just as the children of 1989 have emerged as leaders of today, you the children and young people of 2019 are the leaders of the future. Y'all inspire united states.

Nosotros want to work together with you lot to find the solutions y'all need to tackle the challenges of today, to build better futures for yourselves and the globe you will inherit.

Henrietta H. Fore
UNICEF Executive Director

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Source: https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/open-letter-to-worlds-children

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