ChildPact and its members plan to build a Child Protection Index, composed of country-level child protection indices for each ChildPact country.
The index will be an independent tool to measure each country’s child protection reform in accordance with the UNCRC’s rights based approach and the systems approach to child protection.
The results will show where each country stands in child protection, pointing to those reform areas where more progress is needed.
The index will offer information about: policy development, policy implementation, actual service delivery, capacity for service provision, accountability in the child protection system and coordination of the actors involved.
The index will offer a transparent cross-country comparative view as the countries are assessed across the same list of indicators.
In short, ChildPact’s Child Protection Index is built to:
1. Provide an evidence-based approach to policy debates;
2. Identify needs and gaps in child protection systems;
3. Create cross-national comparisons for advocacy and funding purposes;
4. Push for new efforts on data population;
5. Unify various sectors and actors (government, civil society and academia) under shared principles and increase collaboration.
The Child Protection Index is proposed at an important time in the region. The European Union’s Enlargement and Neighbourhood policies extend resources and technical support to our region in return for economic and social policy reform by government. Previous Enlargement processes produced very important results for the child protection systems of the candidate countries. The EU Enlargement brought tangible results for the most vulnerable children of the new EU Member States. ChildPact believes that this experience can be made available to the current Enlargement and Neighbourhood area and the ChildProtection Index will show which are the areas where the EU support could be most effective.
