Introduction
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development charts an ambitious course for the coming decade and beyond. Reaching further than its precursor, the Millennium Development Goals, the Agenda brings together the social, economic and environmental dimensions of development. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a clarion call for a more equitable future, and at their core is a commitment to leave no one behind.
The SDGs can only deliver on the promise of equity if the world knows which children and families are thriving and which are being left behind – both at the launch of the Agenda and throughout its implementation. This recognition is built directly into the Goals themselves: Goal 17, focused on the means of implementing the Agenda, includes an explicit target on supporting countries to increase the availability of high-quality, timely and disaggregated data.
The global framework for SDG monitoring calls for indicators to be disaggregated wherever relevant to direct government investments, shape service delivery and policy and, ultimately, fulfil the rights of every child.
UNICEF has a long history of meeting data challenges as bold as those set out in the SDGs.
Over the past 70 years, the organization has played a leading role in highlighting inequities in the situation of children. The first report on the State of the World’s Children, published 35 years ago, underlined the need for ‘hard evidence’ to support the implementation and monitoring of international targets. Since then, UNICEF has actively supported countries all over the world to improve the availability and use of child-related data.
Thanks to the increasing availability of disaggregated data, we know more than ever about the deprivations faced by children around the world; and thanks to the increasing use of such data, policies and programmes are increasingly able to focus on advancing equity for children and families. This progress, however, is incomplete. There are still critical gaps in the availability of relevant data, particularly in countries with large numbers of poor and vulnerable children. Closing these data gaps is the first step towards closing the underlying equity gaps.
Understanding the situation of children in relation to the SDGs is crucial both for the wellbeing of children and for reaching the targets of the Global Goals. While there is no goal that exclusively addresses the needs of children, most SDGs have targets that are either directly or indirectly related to children. The world cannot and will not reach most goals unless the specific needs of children are monitored and addressed throughout the course of the 2030 Agenda.
This report considers both the implications of the 2030 Agenda for children and the data required to monitor the situation of children within the SDG framework. The first section identifies 50 global SDG indicators across 14 goals that are likely to be the main focus of future thematic reporting on children in relation to the SDGs.
This initial section focuses on a subset of eight goals which include direct references to children, while the second section examines the global availability of indicators for these goals and ongoing efforts to address key data gaps. The final section identifies priorities for enhancing the collection, analysis and use of data for children within the SDG framework.