“The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health emergency — but it is far more. It is an economic crisis.  A social crisis.  And a human crisis that is fast becoming a human rights crisis.”

– Secretary General, António Guterres

To help countries tackle the devastating social and economic dimensions of the pandemic, with a focus on at-risk groups, the UN issued the UN framework for the immediate socio- economic response to COVID-19 (SERF) in April 2020. The SERF sets out the strategy and blueprint for the UN’s urgent socio-economic response to countries and societies in the face of COVID-19.

Organized by the five streams of work that constitute the SERF (Health First; Protecting People; Economic Response and Recovery; Macroeconomic Response and Multilateral Collaboration; and Social Cohesion and Community Resilience), this checklist provides a list of potential actions, tools, and resources to ensure a human rights-based approach to socio-economic country responses to COVID-19. 

This checklist was developed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations Development Cooperation Office (UN DCO) as the secretariat for the United Nations Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG).