A Territorial Analysis of Child Well-Being in Iran: Introducing a Multidimensional Index

This is the first effort to construct a multidimensional index of child well-being in Iran. This index is composed of 26 indicators which cover the following aspects of child well-being: health, material well-being, education, risk and safety, family, personal well-being, and housing and the environment. Indicators were aggregated in special components, and these components eventually construct a single well-being index. The macro data was retrieved from national data centers to compute the province-level child well-being index for Iran. Results show that child well-being and its domains are distributed unequally among the provinces. Southern and eastern provinces have the worst condition while northern and central provinces have the best. Generally, Iranian children have made significant progress in recent years in education (such as literacy rate and high school graduation rate) and health (such as infant mortality rate and underweight children under 5 years of age). However, there are growing problems in the country, including child labor, high levels of exclusion from high school, a shortage of preschool education, and child abuse.