The Early Childhood Rights Indicators (ECRI) Project was created in 2006 in an attempt to operationalize and increase the utility of the General Comment 7: Implementing Child Rights in Early Childhood (GC7). GC7 was created in response to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (the Committee) observation that young children under the age of 8 were often overlooked in State parties’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) reports.
The ECRI tool was created in collaboration with numerous international agencies and partners as a global tool to facilitate the monitoring and implementation of the CRC, with a particular focus on children aged 0-8. The tool contains 17 indicator sets that look at the structures, processes, and outcomes related to respecting, protecting, and fulfilling the rights of young children.
The data from all indicator sets is used to create a snapshot of a country’s capacity, in support of the different rights articulated in the CRC and reiterated in GC7 for young children, in the form of a heatmap.
From 2009 to 2017, the ECRI tool was piloted in one low- (Tanzania: 2009-2010), one medium- (Chile: 2010-2012), and one high-resource (the province of British Columbia, Canada: 2015-2017) setting.
