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The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was unanimously agreed upon by the 193 Member States of the UN General Assembly in September 2015.1 The 2030 Agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. Member States resolved to “end poverty in all its forms”, to take bold and transformative steps to “shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path”, and to ensure that “no one will be left behind”.
The 2030 Agenda establishes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 global targets relating to both development outcomes and means of implementation, designed to be integrated and indivisible and to balance the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.
It further seeks to realize the human rights of all, and to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. This ambitious new universal agenda is intended to be implemented by all countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership.
A critical component of the 2030 Agenda is that every child is protected from violence, exploitation and harmful practices. This marks the first time that protection of children from these rights violations has formally been included in a global monitoring framework with timebound targets.
Child protection refers to prevention and response to violence, exploitation and abuse of children in all contexts. This includes child marriage, violence in all forms, female genital mutilation (FGM), child labour, trafficking, and lack of official recording of births.
Reaching children who are especially vulnerable to these threats is another important component of child protection, such as those living without family care, on the streets, in detention or in situations of conflict or natural disasters.
The Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) developed a list of indicators designed to measure progress towards the SDGs. Of the 232 indicators, 11 explicitly address child protection issues. But protecting children from violence and exploitation is pivotal to achieving progress not just in these 11 indicators, but also across many different targets within the SDG framework.
For instance, the eradication of child marriage could be instrumental in reducing levels of child mortality. Studies have consistently shown that the younger a girl marries, the more likely she is to have a child at a young age, and infants born to adolescent mothers have a greater mortality rate.
The SDGs represent an incredible opportunity to help protect the world’s children from violence and exploitation. At the same time, monitoring countries’ progress comes with a unique set of measurement and resource-capability challenges. While significant advancements have been made in the last 15 years in increasing the availability and quality of child protection statistics, only about one in five countries have sufficient data to assess progress towards protectionrelated SDG targets.
Solid data are needed to shift the invisibility of child protection violations, to capture the true scale and extent of these phenomena, and to identify risk and protective factors. Reliable data are also needed to specify priority areas and support government planning and budgeting for effective interventions and services. They inform the development and implementation of policies, legislation and actions for prevention and response, and also ensure a robust and ongoing monitoring process to assess results. Data enable stakeholders to appropriately identify and address challenges.
This publication summarizes the development and implementation of the SDG global indicator framework and describes how child protection fits within it.
Detailed information on each protection-related global SDG indicator under goals 5, 8 and 16 is provided, along with guidance on the collection, analysis, monitoring and reporting on these indicators at national and global levels. Key challenges and strategies for improved monitoring and measurement of child protection are also discussed.