There is an increasing understanding of the essential need for data on children in vulnerable situations, including children on the move, children in alternative care, children without parental care, and children in poverty. The call for adequate data on the number of children in these situations and the support that is or is not available to them is growing day by day, from a variety of large international organisations – such as UNICEF, Lumos, Eurochild, Hope and Homes for Children and SOS Children’s Villages – as well as from people in academia. The more people start to become interested in data on children in vulnerable situations and start looking around for them, the more obvious it is that there is a serious lack in this area.
I have addressed this issues before in blogs (among other places HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE). And the awareness of the need for this data is the reason why I have been and am involved in various projects that aim to show where data is lacking, why it is important to have them, and indicate how this situation could be improved.
An example of this is the DataCare Project, done by Eurochild and UNICEF, where I am part of the research team that mapped the data collection on children in alternative care in the 27 EU countries and the UK (you can find more information HERE). The aim of the project is both to create an overview, and to discover how it might be possible to create a demand for more and better data – by making stakeholders see the advantages of having quality data, and how gathering them could be achieved.
Recently, I was in a conversation with someone who works in child protection in Latin America. We were discussing the need for better data and the challenges in getting them. When I brought up the concept of trying to create a demand for better data on children in vulnerable situations, she was very interested. However, she felt that in countries with unstable governments that have little capacity for – or interest in – focusing on areas like child protection, let alone data collection on the subject, this would be a very hard sell. I agreed with her, and we also agreed that while in countries where the government takes charge of child protection the argument that better and more complete data helps more informed decision making and more cost-effective budgeting can be a strong argument to get them interested in better data collection, in countries where child protection is mostly taken care of by NGOs and/or faith-based organisations, there is likely to be much less interest in this.
However, this does not need to be a dead-end, necessarily. When most of the money comes from (foreign) donations, the government might not be particularly interested in how spending on child protection can be made more cost-effective, but large donors might. A lot of progress has already been made in persuading large international donors, like the EU and USAID to stop giving money for institutional care. A similar advocacy approach might also be able to create a demand for adequate data with these donors. This could help lead to better data for example by having providing aid money come with the condition of receiving data that will allow monitoring of how it is used, or what the outcomes are. Or major organisations may be persuaded to start collecting their own data or to commission data collection on their behalf, which would benefit the country the data are collected in.
It is not a straightforward problem and there are no simple answers. However, without data, it is impossible to know just how many children are in vulnerable situations and what kind of help they need to possibly come out of those vulnerable situations. As long as there are no data, policy-makers can close their eyes to the problems, because there is no data to indicate they exist. It is imperative to have data, and so we must keep looking for ways to increase the chances of data being collected and actually used for policy decisions.
Next month there will be no blog. A short ‘holiday’, while I work with the research team to complete the final report for the DataCare Project, which will be made available to to public before the end of the year. In September the blog will be back with the ‘traditional’ look at what has been happening for Family-Based Solutions over the past year.
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