What is GlobalChild?
GlobalChild (GCh) is a digital child rights monitoring platform through a generous five-year grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
After years of intense research and development, the GCh platform is now ready to be piloted. In 2020, the international Steering Committee (SC) of GlobalChild decided that the first Canadian pilot of the platform would occur in the province of New Brunswick (NB). In 2022, Belgium was approved to run the first international pilot concurrently.
The Belgian pilot : an international première!
The “BE-Pilot” is a collaboration between the GlobalChild team and the National Commission on the Rights of the Child – Belgium (NCRC) to take inventory of the structures and processes currently in place in Belgium to support children’s substantive rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and to use the GlobalChild platform to collect data that could serve the preparation of Belgium’s 2025 (TBC) report on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). GlobalChild is a comprehensive, yet user-friendly tool that translates the provisions, benchmarks, and government responsibilities for all 41 substantive rights in the CRC into a set of practical indicators. Accordingly, as the first international pilot jurisdiction, the BE-Pilot will also aim to evaluate the GlobalChild platform’s feasibility, acceptability, relevance to local conditions and overall value as a system to raise awareness of, and create accountability for, the rights of the child.
GCh is designed to support all 196 States Parties (SPs) to monitor their implementation of the CRC by taking inventory of State Parties’ capacities to support all child rights. Such an inventory will highlight the strengths as well as gaps in the existing capacities and assist politicians and policy makers in evidence-informed decision-making. Within GCh, 3 sets of indicators have been developed for each right following the UN High Commission for Human Rights Structure-Process-Outcome (SPO) methodology for human rights indicator development: (1) Structure-related indicators, which record governments’ structural commitments to a right (e.g. laws, institutions, strategies, or budgetary allocations); (2) Process-related indicators, which verify how governments act upon the commitments they have made (e.g. programs and initiatives); and (3) Outcome-related indicators, which capture changes experienced by children as a result of governments’ commitments and actions.
Taken together, data collected for all three sets of indicators will highlight the strengths in the government’s capacities in support of children’s rights under the CRC, identify any gap, and facilitate examination of this data vis-à-vis the child outcome data. Such examination may reveal associations and provide evidence to guide policy or program initiatives to improve child outcomes.
The major objectives of this project are:
- 1. To gather baseline data on particular substantive rights under the CRC;
- 2. To analyze the collected data and understand Belgium’s capacity in support of these rights, and identify the strengths and gaps in capacity;
- 3. To use the collected data and prepare a report that can serve as the starting draft of Belgium’s 2024 CRC report;
- 4. To test the capacity of the platform in gathering relevant data required for monitoring the status of certain rights under the CRC and refine the tool, if needed, prior to subsequent pilots; and
- 5. To carry out knowledge translation activities on the strengths and gaps in Belgium’s capacity to promote and support data-informed decision making in support of children’s rights and development.
In addition to these objectives, the project is expected to offer a series of benefits to the country. These include:
Building capacity for data collection and tracking: Belgium is the first international jurisdiction to champion collecting comprehensive quantitative and qualitative data required for the indicator sets of particular children’s rights under the CRC. The methods employed and lessons learned through this pilot will pave the way for improved periodical data collection and preparation for Belgium’s periodic UNCRC reports and other UN human rights reporting. Additionally, the BE-Pilot will recruit and engage stakeholders from within the government to build a data collection team (see “Task Force” below). This team will remain a resource for the country for future rounds of data collection and preparation of CRC reports. Lastly, over time, repeated data collection with GCh will build an important data repository on child rights enforcement efforts and child well-being around in Belgium. Such a data repository and the longitudinal data within it can serve as an invaluable research tool.
Strategic positioning: The lessons learned from the BE-Pilot will allow the GCh team to refine the platform further and more effectively roll-out the platform in other international jurisdictions. Belgium is the first international jurisdiction in the world to pilot this global platform, which will have bearing on future GCh pilots.