Child health and wellbeing dashboards: accountability for children's rights

The WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission's report also makes recommendations for building a better future for children by placing them at the centre of global, regional, and national development agendas and by holding governments to account for fulfilling children's rights through a robust monitor, review, and act cycle.1 This cycle depends on the availability of an accountability mechanism that showcases country performance across the four dimensions of the CRC: children's right to be healthy, protected, educated, and fairly treated and heard.2 To assess country progress on the CRC, the Commissioners developed a child flourishing and futures composite index, which showed that wealthier countries perform better than their poorer counterparts on child health and development outcomes but are imperilling children's futures through excessive greenhouse gas emissions and industry practices that are contributing to environmental degradation.1 These results compelled the Commissioners to propose the development of an additional accountability mechanism, a user-friendly dashboard that helps countries to regularly monitor their progress on child health and wellbeing and make evidence-based decisions about priority areas for action and resource allocation. [...]to use the four domain areas in the CRC and label them as survive, protection, development, and participation plus the cross-cutting domain of contextual and policy factors. [...]to use the standard age categories recommended by WHO for children and adolescents.6 The second step involved selecting indicators to populate the dashboard, which required selecting one indicator for each of the four domains for each age grouping and agreeing on a core set of contextual and policy indicators most relevant for influencing children's life chances.