UNICEF

United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF is headquartered in New York, but a large part of the activities take part in the eight regional offices and 126 country offices supported by national committees.

Activities

UNICEF has its principal focus on long-term programmes for improving the conditions for children in developing countries. This includes

  • health
  • basic education
  • food
  • sanitation
  • water supply.

Emergency situations

UNICEF also takes part in emergency and reconstruction aid. Operations in conflict and civil war areas have intensified the cooperation with a number of UN, non-governmental organizations and national governments.

Opinion-building

An important part of the work is opinion-building. UNICEF is financed almost exclusively by voluntary contributions from the UN member states and from private donors.

Unicef logo

More on Unicef

Convention on the Rights of the Child | Barnkonventionen

As part of opinion-building and to provide inform about conditions for the world's children, UNICEF publishes a vast amount of information material, reports and books, some of which is directed to children.

The UNICEF website provides background information, news, statistics, full text documents and reports:

  • The Executive Board of UNICEF submits an annual report to the ECOSOC in the documentary series Economic and Social Council Official Records. Supplement No. 14. It provides a summary of UNICEF's programme and activities with references to relevant documents and reports.
  • Evaluation and Research Database - ERD contains abstracts and full text reports of evaluations and surveys related to UNICEF programmes.
  • Unicef data.
  • Unicef and the Sustainable Goals (SDGs).

Publications

  • The State of the World's Children is an annual report containing analyses, human interest stories, country profiles, maps and statistical data for 195 countries and territories.
  • UNICEF Annual Report is a survey of the achievements and activities by UNICEF.
  • Facts for Life - a simple guide to basic child care - is one of the world's most widely read books. It is translated into 215 languages.
  • UNICEF’s Humanitarian Action for Children highlights the situation of children and women across countries; draws attention to the support needed to help these children to survive and thrive; and shows the results UNICEF and partners are working toward.
  • We the Children is a review of the progress made and the setbacks which arose in meeting the commitments of the 1990 World Summit for Children, including recommendations for further action.
  • World Summit for Children, 2002.

Find more about the United Nations' work on the Rights of the Child.

UNICEF was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 1965.

UN documents and publications in catalogues and databases

  • United Nations Digital Library offers UN documents and open access publications, UN voting data and speeches, UN maps, Content in 6+ languages. Replaces the traditional online catalogue UNBISnet.
  • UN iLibrary UN publications online covering different topics.
  • ODS full-text UN documents published from 1993 onward and scanned documents published between 1946 and 1993 in the official languages of the UN.
  • Daily list of documents (ODS). Documents published for the day, with full text links, can be found in the United Nations full text database ODS.
  • UNBIS Thesaurus a multilingual database of the controlled vocabulary used to describe UN documents.
  • Index to proceedings is an annual bibliographic guide to the proceedings and documentation of the major UN organs. The index includes:
    • a list of all documents
    • a comprehensive subject index
    • an index to speeches
    • a voting chart of resolutions
  • United Nations Documents Index (United Nations Digital Library) References to all documents by subject area are published. A collection of indexes is held by the Dag Hammarskjöld and Law Library, Uppsala, and the Libraries at UN Headquarters in New York and Geneva.
UN Documents available online
Last modified: 2023-11-23
Print