Dashboard for monitoring children’s quality of life

The municipality of Kopavogur, in cooperation with Icelandic Committee for UNICEF and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Children created a dashboard for monitoring children’s quality of life. The project was sparked from the notion that international indicators to monitor children’s health and well-being are not always adapted to the needs of high-income countries: child mortality rates are usually low, and most children have access to clean water, but children are increasingly dealing with emerging challenges such as mental health and increased screen time.

The aim of the dashboard is to provide systematic, timely and holistic data about children’s well-being, which would help the local government to decide where to focus efforts and to assess whether interventions are creating the desired impact.

The Child Friendly City Index is based on the four core principles in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and has four sub-indexes: equity; education; health and well-being; and security and protection and communal participation. Each sub-index consists of 5–11 indicators that can be examined individually and be tracked over time. Data are being collected by a private company, but the project will compile the existing data into an interactive dashboard and convert numerical data into an index to help monitor children’s quality of life. This information will be made available to everyone in the municipality.