COVID-19 and Human Development: Assessing the Crisis, Envisioning the Recovery
![](/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/styles/publication_cover_image_mobile/public/migration/np/UNDP-TR-COVID-19-and-Human-Development---Under-embargo-until-20-May-2020-8-am-New-York-2-pm-Geneva-1.png?itok=Ka4yYB7l)
COVID-19 and Human Development: Assessing the Crisis, Envisioning the Recovery
May 21, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic is unleashing a human development crisis. On some dimensions of human development, conditions today are equivalent to levels of deprivation last seen in the mid-1980s. But the crisis is hitting hard on all of human development’s constitutive elements: income (with the largest contraction in economic activity since the Great Depression), health (directly causing a death toll over 300,000 and indirectly leading potentially to an additional 6,000 child deaths every day from preventable causes over the next 6 months) and education (with effective out-of-school rates – meaning, accounting for the inability to access the internet – in primary education expected to drop to the levels of actual rates of the mid-1980s levels). This, not counting less visible indirect effects, including increased domestic violence, yet to be fully documented.