Child Friendly Cities
Child Friendly Cities

A Child Friendly City is a local system of good governance
committed to fulfilling children's rights
UNICEF

Child well-being and CFC


The concept of child friendliness is closely connected to child well-being which, since the 1996 UN Habitat Conference, has been identified as the “ultimate indicator” of a healthy sustainable community. Child well-being spans several dimensions – including physical, psychological, cognitive, social, and economic – and basically provides an image of the children’s situation in different domains. It expands upon the concepts of multidimensional child poverty and deprivation, which generally retain a focus on material factors. Child well-being may be represented as a map of key dimensions and corresponding indicators that describe children’s living conditions and satisfaction of their needs. The starting point for its definition is the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which summarises well-being in such principles as the right to “an adequate standard of living” (Art. 27) or the “highest attainable standard of health care” (Art.24). 

A recent attempt to assess child well-being in industrialised countries is presented in UNICEF’s Report Card No. 7. The analysis uses a number of indicators grouped in six dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s subjective sense of their own well-being. 

Several countries have engaged in the effort of developing a map of child well-being. Nationally defined sets of indicators vary according to the country and on the availability of data. For example, participation is one area that is often led aside, considering the selection of indicators is mostly driven by the availability of official data and surveys. 

Monitoring child well-being indicators at the local level is useful for a child friendly city/community. However, relatively few examples of locally applicable maps, indicators or databases have been identified. The assessment of child well-being at the local level is challenged by the limited availability and representativeness of data. A range of methods may be used to summarise and present information on child well-being. Data on specific indicators or dimensions may be gathered in multiple tables or overlapping maps. Alternatively, multiple dimensions may be condensed into a single value or index, which is easily accessible and can be appealing for advocacy purposes. But indexes tend to mask variations in performances on different dimensions, as is usually seen in assessments on well-being. Consequently, composite or hybrid approaches are often used, as best suiting available data on local situations. 

Within the CFC Initiative, some countries (e.g. Brazil, The Philippines, Spain, and France) have identified key dimensions andindicators to monitor and assess the level of child friendliness of cities and communities and to promote a positive competition among the concerned local settings framed into an accreditation/award system. The current UNICEF IRC/Childwatch-CERG research project also aims at developing assessment and monitoring tools which overlap key dimensions and indicators on child well-being based on the CRC. The participatory approach is a distinct feature of these tools, as children, caregivers and community members are the main source of data for the completion of the assessment process. 

Examples of efforts to envision how children perceive their own well-being have also been promoted, like in Ireland and Australia. 

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