The GlobalChild Project

Monitoring children’s rights around the world

The GlobalChild Project is a CIHR-funded project that has created a comprehensive child rights monitoring platform to facilitate and support the ability of the 196 signatory States to comply with their obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

GlobalChild will also be of interest to civil society organizations, children’s ombudspersons, child and youth representatives, others involved in reporting to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and other groups as a means to collect and track change in securing children’s rights using a human rights-based approach to indicators.

A comprehensive indicator framework and database

This multilingual digital monitoring and accountability platform houses a framework of indicators designed to correlate government policy, implementation structures, and processes with child health and development outcomes. The GlobalChild platform will become a valuable database that can help align Canada’s internal processes with our international obligations and commitments to the CRC, as well as Canada’s commitments to reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

In addition to providing a fully contextualized database available to different levels of government and researchers, the GlobalChild platform will address consistent weaknesses in CRC reporting. Ultimately, it will provide credible evidence to evaluate existing government service delivery against international standards and to guide the development of more effective policies and procedures.

The GlobalChild platform will assist governments in:

• Fulfilling their internal responsibility and international accountability to their children.

• Monitoring and reporting on the status of every right under the CRC.

• Tracking how effectively governments have met their obligations in supporting each right and how it impacted children’s development.

The GlobalChild Project is a 5+5 years project.

A thriving research program that links child health and development to child rights

GlobalChild was developed by an international team of researchers, child rights advocates and child health and development experts, led by Canadian researcher Dr. Ziba Vaghri.

The platform was built upon 41 indicator sets developed for the 41 substantive rights of children under the CRC and aims to promote and facilitate the implementation and monitoring of the CRC.

Each indicator set is comprised of:

1. Structure-related indicators to verify the existence of structural support (e.g., policies) for the fulfillment of each right;
2. Process-related indicators that verify the existence of process-related support (e.g., budgetary allocations) for the fulfillment of each right; and
3. Outcome-related indicators to verify any change in the lives of children related to that right (e.g., high school graduation rate as an outcome for the right to education).

Together these questions provide a tool to understand:

1. How the governments, as duty bearers, are upholding their obligations under the CRC; and
2. How children, as the rights holders, are enjoying the fulfillment of their different rights under the CRC.

Our people

• GlobalChild Steering Committee
• GlobalChild Reference Group
• Indicators Development Team
• Expert consultants and reviewers

Download our project overview for more information about the project and our team members.

GlobalChild launch event

The GlobalChild Project was officially launched on Aug. 26, 2016. The main deliverable of this project, the GlobalChild Platform, was officially launched on Dec. 13, 2021. Watch the recording.