Why the private sector is key to building a safer, more sustainable world for children

The world is a tough place for millions of children who are facing conflicts, climate-related disasters, economic instability and a growing digital divide – all of which are threatening their lives, development and well-being.

As UNICEF’s Global Outlook 2025 – Prospects for Children report shows, the outlook for children 2025 doesn’t look much better. With only five years remaining before the global deadline to secure a sustainable future is reached, two-thirds of the child-related UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators are at risk of not being achieved unless there is immediate, accelerated action.

The scale of children’s humanitarian needs is at a historically high level, with more children impacted every day. In 2025, we estimate that 213 million children in 146 countries and territories will need humanitarian assistance over the course of the year – a staggeringly high number.

This includes crises in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. But it also includes humanitarian emergencies in places like Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Myanmar – places that are not often featured in global media coverage.

At the same time, children are at growing risk from the intensifying climate crisis. Today, more than 1 billion children – nearly half the world’s children – live in countries that are at extremely high-risk for the impacts of climate change.

They are increasingly exposed to droughts and heatwaves, more powerful storms and more extensive flooding, air pollution and disease. Disasters linked to climate change are disrupting children’s supplies of nutritious food and safe water; and they are undermining essential social service delivery.

Climate change and conflict are also forcing children to leave their homes and communities – often multiple times. At the end of 2023, nearly 50 million children were displaced due to conflict, violence, and natural disasters – accounting for 40% of all forcibly displaced people globally.

Extreme weather including floods, droughts and storms are displacing an estimated 20,000 children every day. And, on average, children’s displacement lasts five years, meaning that many children spend up to a quarter of their childhood in host locations, often with their basic rights denied.

Unfortunately, funding is not keeping pace with the growing humanitarian needs. UNICEF depends on flexible humanitarian funding, or funding that is not earmarked for specific emergencies, to respond quickly to emerging crises, anticipate future risks, and equitably allocate resources to where they are needed most. This is also critical for reaching children in emergencies that have been largely forgotten by the international community.

The private sector can play a critical role in reversing this trend by supporting with flexible resources and technical expertise, both of which will help us to save children’s lives and strengthen the social systems that they rely on for the longer term.

The private sector can also play a key role in helping to mitigate the negative impacts of the climate crisis on children. It has the expertise, resources, and capacity to effect substantial transformations in addressing climate change with innovation, speed, and scale. By leveraging these capabilities, we can multiply the impacts of climate action.

UNICEF’s Today and Tomorrow Initiative (TTI) is the world’s first climate risk financing platform for children, aiming to reduce the number of children directly impacted by tropical cyclone disasters, while building communities’ resilience.

Up to $100 million in coverage via a child-focused parametric insurance policy is being provided in eight pilot countries – reaching an estimated 13.5 million children and their family members over three years. By working with more private sector partners on this initiative, we could expand its impact to cover other climate-related disasters in more geographical areas.

Beyond climate change and conflict, economic crises and poverty also affect the lives of millions of children. Today, nearly 400 million children live in countries in debt distress. In 2024, developing countries spent 14% of government revenues on interest payments alone—double what they spent 15 years ago.

The debt crisis, compounded by declining quality official development assistance (ODA), means that countries are not investing adequately in areas like education and healthcare, which undermines their ability to repay the debt and creates a damaging cycle of intergenerational poverty.

The most vulnerable children, including girls and those with disabilities, suffer disproportionately from the loss of essential services. This failure to invest fully in children’s futures directly affects business by limiting the availability of skilled, educated workers in the future. It is imperative that the private sector joins advocacy efforts for debt relief and supports the development of innovative financing mechanisms, such as public-private partnerships, to ensure investment in current and future generations.

UNICEF is exploring how sovereign debt solutions could play a role in the achievement of the sustainable development goals for children through financial restructuring with the objective of enabling indebted countries to make their debt more manageable in exchange for achieving pre-agreed benchmarks for children.

The private sector has a key role to play in the delivery of digital services to children and families. Today, nearly 26% of people in low-income countries are connected to the internet, compared to more than 95% in high-income countries. Far too many children – especially girls – remain locked out of the internet, reflecting a mix of affordability, the absence of basic infrastructure, including electricity and broadband, and weak digital skills and literacy.

Digital inequalities risk being deepened in a world where government services are increasingly delivered through digital public infrastructure (DPI). The growing focus on DPI is a welcome step towards digital transformation. But realizing DPI’s potential – and minimizing the risks to marginalized children – will require a concerted effort from governments, international organizations and the private sector.

The challenges we face are global, but the solutions must address both global and local needs. We need systems that go beyond service delivery to build resilience into every area of a child’s life so that they don’t just respond, they anticipate.

This could include disaster preparedness frameworks to safeguard communities, inclusive healthcare that responds to both immediate and future risks, or education systems that can adapt during emergencies.

To navigate this changing global environment, meet the SDG child-related targets and ensure that we can deliver on our promise of equity – for every child, everywhere – we must scale up with the private sector to deliver action on child rights and ensure that children are protected, supported, and able to thrive.

Now more than ever, we need the agility to act and seize every opportunity – reversing the threats to decades of hard-fought progress and choosing humanity over fragmentation, resilience over fragility.