19 million displaced children vulnerable to coronavirus – UNICEF

The United Nations Children Funds has warned that an estimated 19 million internally displaced children globally are among the world’s most vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic.

UNICEF, in a release on Tuesday to capture the number of children displaced, stated that globally, an estimated 19 million children, including Nigerians, more than ever before, were living in displacement within their own countries due to conflict and violence in 2019.

It revealed that in northeastern Nigeria, there are currently 1.9 million people displaced from their homes, 60 percent of whom are children with 1 in 4 under the age of five.

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UNICEF Representative in Nigeria, Peter Hawkins said, hundreds of thousands of children in north-eastern Nigeria were living in the shadow of conflict and now in the increasingly challenging shadow of a global pandemic and its potential socio-economic aftermath.