Coronavirus: pandemic will put human development ‘into reverse’

The coronavirus pandemic will trigger the first decline in human development since records began in 1990.

An African classroom.

The coronavirus pandemic will trigger the first decline in human development since records began, the UN has warned.

Education, health and living standards improved year-on-year for the majority of the world’s population since the UN Development Program began measuring them in 1990. This year, however, for the first time in four decades, that trend will reverse, widening inequality globally.

The UN program described a “triple hit to health, education and income” that will cause global per-capita income to fall by 4 per cent this year. “The combined impact of these shocks could signify the largest­ reversal in human development on record,” it said.

One of the starkest measurements is the blow the virus has struck to education, leaving 60 per cent of the world’s children without access to learning. Such figures have not been seen since the 1980s. Even that deprivation, however, is uneven and highlights a “digital divide” that handicaps the poorest.

Remote learning means 20 per cent of children in developed countries are missing out on education, a figure that soars to 86 per cent in the developing world.

Even the financial crisis, from 2007-09, did not change the an­nual global trend of improvement.

Pedro Conceicao, director of the UNDP’s human development report office, said the pandemic had shown internet access as a “new necessity”.

The pandemic was magnifying pre-existing tensions “between people and technology, between people and the planet, between the haves and the have-nots”, he said.

“Even after an epidemic ends or economic growth returns, the impacts­ of a shock can leave lasting­ damage. The effects are unequally distributed.”

The Times