Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grants - Institute/Initiative Community Support

Children around the world are developing obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic health conditions at increasingly younger ages. Meanwhile, physical fitness, particularly cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness, is increasingly recognized as an important indicator of current and future child health. However, most countries still lack standardized and comparable child fitness surveillance data, especially in low- and middle-income countries and underserved communities. This limits the ability to identify children at risk early and develop effective prevention strategies. FIT-VITAL Kids (Fitness Indicators as a Tracking Vital sIgn for Active Life in Kids) is an international initiative designed to establish the foundation for a future multinational child fitness surveillance study involving children aged 6-10 years across seven countries: Canada, Brazil, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and Mongolia. The initiative positions physical fitness as a "vital sign" for child health and aims to develop harmonized, equity-informed approaches to monitoring child fitness and related health indicators globally. This Planning Grant will support an international convening and ongoing collaborative activities involving researchers, public health experts, and child fitness specialists from participating countries. Planning activities will focus on harmonizing assessment protocols, developing governance and data-sharing structures, refining equitable sampling approaches, and preparing future multinational grant applications. The project aligns strongly with the priorities of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health by supporting prevention-oriented child health research and healthy development across the life course. Importantly, the initiative prioritizes equitable participation from low- and middle-income countries and underserved populations often underrepresented in global child health surveillance.