Child rights monitoring
Turkmenistan created a favourable enabling environment to realize the rights of children and women.
Challenge
Turkmenistan created a favourable enabling environment to realize the rights of children and women. It ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and aligned a number of national laws with the Conventions. The new Constitution recognizes the primacy of universally accepted norms of international law. There is not a separate governance system specifically focusing on children’s rights in Turkmenistan. The country adopted two Optional Protocols to the CRC, but hasn’t adopted the Third Protocol on Communication procedures yet.
The 2030 Agenda explicitly recognizes the key role of data in achieving results. Similarly, the 2015 recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, states that Turkmenistan needs to improve its data collection system. The data should cover all areas of the Convention and should be disaggregated by age, sex, disability, geographic location, ethnic and national origin and socio-economic background, to facilitate an analysis of the situation of all children, particularly those in vulnerable situations.
Solution
A growing number of adolescents in the country are potentially prone to adopt new normative frameworks, pro-social behaviours and life skills. As recognized by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, children should be able to form and express opinions, to participate in decision-making processes and influence solutions. The current national development agenda offers promising prospects for children’s participation in the context of implementation and monitoring of the child-related targets and indicators under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the country. The National Plan of Action for Children for 2018-2022 also provides space for engagement of children into the monitoring of their rights as drivers of change.
To generate information on the bottlenecks to services for vulnerable children, UNICEF enhances the capacity of statistical, health, education and social protection agencies to monitor and report in a transparent manner on child rights and on recommendations and concluding observations of relevant treaty bodies.
The Government of Turkmenistan has started taking important steps towards increasing data availability and its use for evidence-based programming. Following the early adoption of SDG targets and indicators, Turkmenistan started working on the implementation of the global assessment. The UN system supports SDG implementation in Turkmenistan. In 2019, the country submitted its first Voluntary National Report with support from all UN agencies, using the data from UNICEF supported Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. MICS provides critical disaggregated data that can be used in SDG monitoring and policy development on children and women.
UNICEF collaborated with the State Statistics Committee on producing the first ever assessment of the child-related SDG indicators in Turkmenistan. This report provides an in-depth analysis on the availability of data and disaggregation for 55 child related indicators to be collected in Turkmenistan.
UNICEF engages with civil society organizations and advocates for more extensive involvement of non-governmental organizations into monitoring of child rights, identification of core gaps and delivery of support services for the most vulnerable groups of children.
