COVID-19, Inequalities and Building Back Better - Policy Brief by the HLCP Inequalities Task Team

The United Nations Secretary-General has described inequality as the defining challenge of our era — one that the COVID-19 crisis has thrown into even greater relief. Moreover, the pandemic threatens to derail progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). COVID-19’s immediate health impacts, coupled with its longer-term social and economic consequences, have cost more than a million lives, destroyed countless livelihoods, curtailed young people’s education, increased violence against women and threatened food security. The pandemic is expected to reverse decades of progress on poverty reduction and worsen inequalities.

The new Policy Brief," COVID 19, inequalities and building back better" developed by the High-Level Committee on Programmes (HLCP) Inequalities Task Team, is a collaborative effort of 22 UN entities to strengthen the UN system’s leadership, coordination and impact on reducing inequalities and supporting SDG 10.

The report highlights how the COVID-19 crisis is widening disparities between people,  and puts forward concrete recommendations for governments, as well as UN Country Teams that support them, to seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to ‘build back better’.