Grant: Project Grant

Positive and negative experiences during childhood shape health outcomes throughout life. Health is the net result of opportunities for development, education, and participation. Canada is one of 196 signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which has declared such opportunities as human rights for ALL children to enjoy optimal health and development. Yet, in Canada, these opportunities are not provided for all children equitably. As a result there is a pronounced health inequity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. Health inequities often stem from discriminatory policies and differential service provision. We have built a team of researchers in child health, development, child rights and Indigenous knowledge and we propose to create Indigenous-GlobalChild (I-GCh), a comprehensive electronic child rights monitoring platform. This platform will be a systematic way to measure the implementation of the CRC by collecting data on the governments' laws, policies and programs in support of each right, and to compare that data to CRC benchmarks to understand how the government is fulfilling its CRC obligations to Indigenous children. We will also consult with Indigenous children (10-17 years), in thirteen regions in Canada, to seek their opinions on their rights, which will then be incorporated into the indicators. Once the I-GCh platform is developed, repeated use will create a remarkable data repository of governments' policies and programs in support of each right. Such a database will help researchers explore different research questions and will assist with evidence-informed policy-making. In the longer term, this can enhance health outcomes of Indigenous children. We will also develop human rights training tools and translate them into several Indigenous languages. These tools will build capacity of children to understand and defend their human rights, while promoting the use of Indigenous languages.