'Woefully off track': global goals leave behind over half the world's children

More than half a billion of the world’s poorest children are invisible to the international organisations that could help them most.

Children worldwide are “uncounted” in development targets because they live in countries where the data required to monitor and evaluate key areas such as education and nutrition is unavailable, Unicef has warned.

According to a report on child-related sustainable development goals (SDGs), roughly 650 million children live in countries where the targets will remain unattainable unless accelerated progress is made to meet current targets.

Following current trends, roughly 10 million children will die of preventable causes before their fifth birthday, while 31 million children will be stunted because they lack adequate nutrition, Unicef claims.

“More than half the world’s children live in countries where we either can’t track their SDG progress, or where we can and they are woefully off track,” said Laurence Chandy, Unicef’s director for the division of data, research and policy.

“Two years ago, the world agreed on an ambitious agenda to give every child the best chance in life, with cutting-edge data analysis to guide the way. Yet, what our comprehensive report on SDG progress for children reveals plainly is an abject lack of data. Most countries do not have the information even to assess whether they are on track or not.”

The Unicef report measures countries’ progress in meeting child-related targets in five areas: health, learning, protection from violence and exploitation, equal opportunity and safe environment.

Only a minority of nations have met the targets in learning, protection and equal opportunity, the report showed. On average, roughly 80% of child-related indicators in countries either have insufficient data or show insufficient progress.

Unicef said ambitious global targets and immature monitoring frameworks were among the reasons for the paucity of data.

Source: theguardian