9. COVID-19 严重破坏了全世界儿童的学习和福祉。在疫情之前，教育进展就过于缓慢，无法到 2030 年实现可持续发展目标 4。今天，全世界有 6 亿多儿童和青少年不能达到阅读和数学的最低水平，尽管三分之二的儿童和青少年正在学校学习。数字鸿沟加剧了这种不平等——世界上三分之二的学龄儿童家中没有互联网，进一步学习和技能发展的机会受到限制。7 童工问题持续存在。最新的国际估计显示，进入 2020 年，全球有 1.6 亿儿童(6 300 万女童和 9 700 万男童)从事童工劳动，接近世界儿童总数的十分之一。
9. COVID-19 wreaked havoc worldwide on children’s learning and well-being. Before the pandemic, progress in education was already too slow to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 by 2030. Today, over 600 million children and adolescents worldwide are unable to attain minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics, even though two thirds of them are in school. Compounding these inequities is a digital divide: two thirds of the world’s school-aged children do not have an Internet connection in their homes, restricting their opportunities to further their learning and skills development. 7 Child labour remains a persistent problem in the world today. The latest international estimates indicate that 160 million children – 63 million girls and 97 million boys – were in child labour globally at the beginning of 2020, accounting for almost 1 in 10 of all children worldwide.