Sri Lanka, a lower-middle-income country, is facing an acute crisis following the impact of the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and other compounding factors that have profoundly affected the country and jeopardized progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
Despite important progress made for children over the past decades across most dimensions, many children do not have an adequate standard of living and significant inequalities have been aggravated by the current crisis, which has disproportionally affected urban daily wage labourers, and families from poor households in the estate sector1, rural areas and the Northern and Eastern Provinces.
UNICEF is taking urgent action by supporting emergency measures in the short term that safeguard children and mitigate a worsening situation, while also supporting the State to recover and expand services in the medium term.
