A regular State of the City's Children Report: ensuring sufficient monitoring and data collection on the state of children and their rights

Child Friendly Cities will keep a constant check on the state of their children. Systematically collecting a range of statistics and information on the full range of children, from birth to 18, is fundamental to child-centred policy development. Ensuring that the statistics and information are disaggregated is necessary to highlight any discrimination, for example against girls or boys, minority ethnic groups, disabled children and other groups.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child has identified disaggregated data collection as a vital general measure for implementation of the Convention. Individual government departments and any national statistical and research bureaux hopefully will be involved in developing national "state of the children" reports. City-level processes can link into this, but at a city level it may be possible to look in more detail at the reality of children's lives and in particular at the lives of those suffering discrimination. It is important that the exercise of preparing a report not only documents available information but clearly identifies gaps in knowledge which inhibit evidence-based policy-making in the city.

If a "State of the City's Children" Report is to assess the degree of respect for children's civil and political rights, it will need to regard children as the experts and the only ones in a position to contribute an accurate assessment. The use of child researchers as well as children as objects of research, should be considered. Children should be involved in carrying out evaluations, assessing needs, proposing solutions and in preparing the report.

The statistics and information that are collected will then be analysed and written up, and the report published, disseminated and used as a building block for the Child Friendly City. The report should be prepared and published in forms that make it genuinely accessible not only to key policy makers and community leaders, but also to the public and to children. Use of the internet is valuable, where it is available. Formal and regular debate should be organised among politicians and experts on the conclusions of the report.

EXAMPLES

The CFC Secretariat has gathered a number of examples of regular State of the City's Children Report at both local and national levels of government, and from low-, middle- and high-income nations.

Each example includes the following documents:

• A worksheet describing the project (accessed from the CFC Database)
• Other documents, such as publications, guides, reports and strategies, developed by the project (when available)
• A project review prepared by the CFC Secretariat, based upon in-depth documentation of the project and developed on the basis of a standard research protocol (when available)
• Tools developed by the project (when available)