During the IFCO seminar in London, last December, I was first introduced to the concept of Childonomics, when Jana Hainsworth, Secretary General of Eurochild, mentioned it in her presentation. The little I learned about it that day immediately caught my imagination. And as soon as I was able to find the time to dive deeper into it, I did and became even more interested.
For me the main reason for doing the work I do and taking on the fights that I come across is the well-being of the children and upholding their rights. However, it did not take me very long to discover that in many situations the argument ‘can’t you see the harm that this does to the child’ is far less effective than ‘can’t you see that this is much more expensive’. It is something that frustrates me, but that I have had to learn to live and work with.
As I resigned to the fact that financial arguments are essential in making one’s case, I almost immdiately took this further than most people – as I tend to do with many things. If you have been following these blogs for a while, you may have noticed that I regularly make the case that we should not just consider, for example, the fact that institutionalising children has been shown to be 6 to 20 times more expensive than family-based alternative, simply looking at the day to day costs of keeping them in care, but that we should also look at the costs of the knock-on effects like increased chances of homelessness, criminality, unemployment, mental and physical health issues, and problems caring for their own children once institutionalised children become adults. I have raised this point in blogs, in conversations and in Q&As at conferences. However, until I was introduced to Childonomics, I had yet to see anyone else take it into account in a serious way.
Childonomics is a project started by Eurochild in 2014, of which the first phase has been completed and possibilities for further development are being discussed. It is a tool to determine the long-term social and economic return of investing in various child protection services. It provides a method through which available data can be used to compare the social and economic investment and outcomes of different existing or proposed services, allowing policy makers to make informed decisions about what will constitute the best investments, or helping lobbyists strengthen their case.
One of the models involved in childonomics allows the services available to children and families to be divided into universal, targeted, specialised, and high specialised service, and finally alternative care services. When you take these services as going from left to right in the order just mentioned, then the services to the left are used by most people and cost least per person, while the further you go to the right, the more expensive the services will be per person, but also fewer people will use these services. Plus, generally speaking, more investment in the services on the left hand side is likely to lead to fewer people requiring the more expensive services on the right hand side. These are the kinds of overarching ways of thinking that I have been looking for in others!
I will not go into further detail about the workings of Childonomics. If you would like to know more, you kind find the information HERE, and I recommend that you have a look. I am looking into whether I can play a role in the further development of this project and tool. And if there are further developments, you will of course hear about them.
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