The Global Social Service Workforce Alliance (the Alliance) is proud to join 52 leading children’s and disability rights organizations in calling on the UN Statistical Commission and Inter-Agency Expert Group on the Sustainable Development Goal Indicators to ensure children living outside of families are a part of the SDGs. NGOs and other civil society bodies have been encouraged to give their views on the Indicators, which will make up the monitoring framework and allow progress against the goals to be assessed.
While all children count, not all children are counted. The document “Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Global Action” calls for children’s holistic needs to be fully addressed, including health care, education, and protection from violence, exploitation and abuse. The Alliance supports efforts to ensure that we ‘leave no one behind’ in the post-2015 global development agenda.
As one of the signatories, the Alliance joins in the following recommendations:
- Ensure that children living outside of household and/or without parental care are represented in disaggregated data. If the Post-2015 agenda is to leave no one behind, it is essential that the global monitoring framework includes methodologies to ensure that children living outside of households and/or without parental care are represented and that data is used to inform targeted, appropriate, and accessible interventions.
- Improve and expand data collection methodologies to ensure all children are represented. The post‐2015 global monitoring framework offers an opportunity to do more and better on behalf of the world’s most vulnerable children – ensuring, first and foremost, that they are no longer invisible.
It is estimated that anywhere from 2-8 million children live outside of family care. Most of these children are not orphans and have family members who could provide care with the right support. Given the importance of a strong workforce to provide this support, the Alliance feels it is important to ensure that any enumeration of children outside of family care include collection of workforce data to assist with adequate workforce planning and development to best support family-based care.
The letter to UN Expert Group states: “All children count, but not all children are counted. As a result, some of the world’s most vulnerable children – those without parental care or at risk of being so; in institutions or on the street; trafficked; separated from their families as a result of conflict or disaster; or recruited into armed groups – have largely fallen off the UN’s statistical map. There are only limited data about how many children live in such precarious circumstances, except for scattered estimates from some specific countries.”
The Inter-Agency Expert Group will next meet again in Bangkok from October 26-28, and a final set of indicators is expected to be completed by early 2016. The Alliance joins the voices of support in calling for all children to be counted in these final indicators.
