Child rights monitoring
We need to know more about the lives of the children we serve in the sub-region. Data is a powerful tool to help us make better, more informed decisions to improve their lives.
The challenge
The islands and territories of the Eastern Caribbean are among the most data-deprived in the world. We simply don’t know enough about the children in our region, how they live, how they are raised, how they are vulnerable, what they need to fulfil their potential. Without full and detailed knowledge we will not have the data necessary to plan for children.
There are significant gaps relating to nutrition, health, early childhood development, child protection, reproductive health, social protection, disabilities, substance abuse and violence against women and girls. While several countries conducted valuable research in 2012, (Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys in Barbados, Saint Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago), there are huge information gaps across the others.
Limited human resource capacity and budgets are some of the data-collection challenges for our subregion. We must work with partners to overcome them as good, solid information it the bedrock of our programme, to make sure we are targeting correctly, using resources efficiently and ensuring that no child is left behind.
The solution
UNICEF and our partners have been busy addressing the data gaps concerning children. We use a variety of strategies such as advocacy with policy makers and opinion formers, capacity development, providing technical assistance, sharing good practices and innovations, resource mobilisation, new approaches to data collection and promoting stronger child rights monitoring in national and regional plans.
Our key areas of work include administrative and data support to the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Statistical Digests; generating data for Sustainable Development Goal indicators; supporting significant data collection and analysis exercises such as situation analyses, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and Country Poverty Assessments
We assist countries in improving their capacity to collect, analyse and use data to monitor, inform policy decisions, and report on the situation of children and child poverty in all of its dimensions, using an equity-based approach.