Note taker: Wendy De Bondt Moderator: Sven Retoré

1. International Conference“Measuring the effectiveness of children’s rights – Make all children count!”WG 2: How can synergies and links between child-rights, child well-being indicators and other measuring instruments be developed ?8-9 February 2018, Brussels – Belgium

2. Note taker: Wendy De Bondt Moderator: Sven Retoré

3. Context • A great diversity of monitoring tools already exists in the field of children’s rights, children’s well-being and development (globally, regionally, nationally, sub-nationally). • Adoption of the Agenda 2030 and SDGsand the reporting requirements with regards to their targets adds to that. • Such a proliferation of reporting on implementation obligations, brings the risk of duplication and reporting fatigue. • This comes at the risk of spending more time on data itself rather than on the child behind it. • The cost-efficiency of having multiple parallel systems running?

4. Attention points: • Should a coordinated and/or integrated process be developed for measuring implementation of children’s rights and other related issues (the Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Universal Periodic Review, …)? • Advantages and Disadvantages? • What would be the prerequisites of such a mechanism? • How can the specificity of children’s rights be preserved when and if integrating systems / instruments are in place?

5. Advantages: • The general added value of integration is recognised; • children rights are seen as the theoretical (conceptual, normative, legal) framework for assessment of children’s well-being • strategicly - it would lead to a system-wide engagement, reduce competition between the two camps; • it would avoid overlap and multiplication of efforts • easier to gain media attention and to influnce policy makers with ‘one number’, simplifies messages, encreases understending; • at the same time, enriches research possibilities towards more comprehensive understanding of rights and well-being; cross-fertilization

6. Advantages (cont.): • Integration at the data level promotes data linkages and standardization; • avoids duplication of sources while bringing out more details; • increases consistency and comparability; • allows use of objective (quantitative and qualitative) and subjective data. • integrated availability of data will make it more easy for responsible actors to find the information and use it in policy development

7. Disadvantages: However, some important concerns were raised: • Children’s rights and children’s well-being stem from different disciplines involving a different expertise. • The different legal and practical frameworks require nuances and differences – coming to a common language may make it impossible to translate it back to the national systems. • Overcoming these inherent differences through integration requires intensive investment, that may not give enough return on investment. • It was argued that the rights based approach may be dwarfed by the more developed well-being approach.

8. Disadvantage (cont.) • The integration may increase the number of indicators to a level that makes it impossible to get clear oversight of what is there and that it may become unmenagable. • The integrated approach may give the impression that all data are comparable and compatible. Additional efforts are needed to incorporate sufficient metadata, that is - contextual and methodological information to allow consideration. • It might be difficult to ensure a sufficiently high level of detail that allows disaggregationof data to a lower or local level.

9. Prerequisites for integrated system: • Willingness and comitment to collaboarate • Multistakeholders approach • Clear understanding of both approaches, work on the common language • Building a community that understands the integrated approach • Transparency in data methodology • Data and metadata fully accessible • Shared vision / objectives to ensure that information is comparable / compatible and misinterpretation is avoided. • Reproducibility of datarequires information on methodology so that data validity can be assessed

10. How to preserve specificity of children’s rights: • Child focused, child centered • Leave always possibility of contextualisation • More comprehensive information allows for different research questions to be formulated and different (more in depth) analyses to be conducted • Be clear on relative advantages of either approach • The best interest of the child implies use of the child as the unit of observation and analysis • Enable disaggregation (universality of children’s rights) • Granularity while preserving privacy • Add subjective data

11. Conclusion • More work is needed in building a community that understands the needs for integrated approach • There is a need for case studies with the integrated approach to studies of children’s rights, well-being and well-becoming • Let us not forget: Well-being is a driver of social policy and policy making