Grant: Project Grant

Recognizing the critical importance of children's environment to their lifelong health and development, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child's (CRC) reporting system is intended to help State Parties to identify and correct weaknesses and deficits in government service that impact children. Canada, though one of the driving forces behind the CRC, has consistently fallen short of the desired level of compliance with and reporting on CRC. While reporting difficulties might be explained by Canada's federal structure, it is also possible that inadequate reports reflect inadequate compliance. A comprehensive monitoring tool can facilitate the compliance and reporting. This project is intended to help to align Canadian internal processes with our international obligations and commitments to the CRC, by creating a monitoring and accountability tool. We propose creation of the GlobalChild (GC), a comprehensive child rights monitoring platform based on a framework of indicators designed to correlate government policy, implementation structures and processes with children's health and developmental outcomes. In addition to providing a fully contextualised database available to different levels of government and researchers, GC would address consistent weaknesses in Canadian CRC reporting. Ultimately it will provide credible evidence to evaluate existing government service delivery against international standards and to guide the development of more effective policies and procedures. Based on our decade of work with the UN Committee, we have developed and tested the "Early Childhood Rights Indicators" (ECRI), which is a CRC monitoring tool for children 0-8 years old. We have demonstrated the usefulness of the concept and created international interest in both the ECRI and the possibility of a tool like GC. We intend to build on this to create GC, a fully digitized, bilingual tool for all children in Canada, paying particular attention to our Indigenous children.