# Data is essential to deliver children’s rights
With less than 7 years left, the world is way off-track to reach many of the Sustainable Development Goals for children set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Progress for child rights is being threatened by multiple, overlapping crises with disproportionate impacts on children’s lives. Data to understand this situation is crucial: it helps us to make better decisions, allocate resources effectively and hold policymakers to account for their actions.

# Explore children's different situations
The Child Atlas is Save the Children's new data platform to visualise, compare, analyse and understand children’s outcomes globally. The platform puts high-quality, publicly available data at your fingertips. For the first time, we bring together population-based data on key child development outcomes across multiple thematic areas in one integrated platform. This is complemented by data on risks and crises, public policies and financing decisions, and other contextual information.

- **Explore the different ways inequality affects children’s lives:** The Child Atlas includes disaggregated data where available, emphasising the inequalities in key child development indicators between different groups of children. This data is crucial to support the pledge to Leave No One Behind, allowing us to better understand the intersecting experiences of inequality, and to monitor rates of improvement. In both the Atlas and the country profiles you will find disaggregation by gender, place of residence, wealth, disability and sub-national regions. However, the availability of disaggregated data varies considerably by indicator and data source - you are most likely to find disaggregated data for child outcomes [measured through household surveys](http://www.childatlas.org/blog/count-every-child) (health, nutrition, education, child protection, poverty).

![child-poverty-candleStick.jpg](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmhlewc3v/image/upload/v1694430455/child_poverty_candle_Stick_311277200a.jpg)

- **Understand the relationship between different topics:** Data helps us to draw attention to threats to progress, describe emergent risks and crises, and highlight policies and financing decisions that help to advance children’s rights. Importantly, the Child Atlas helps us to better understand how risks, crises and public policies overlap with children’s outcomes across health, education, protection, and broader well-being. For example, is under-five mortality more concentrated in countries with lower coverage of basic health services? (The answer seems to be yes, as our platform shows. Although we can only show correlations, not causality!) Being able to directly compare child outcomes with potential risks (climate, conflict, hunger, etc.) or policy choices (e.g. public investment in children) is essential if we want to take a more holistic and systemic perspective on children's rights. You can do this directly in the Child Atlas by selecting a secondary topic.

![childmortality_antenatalcare.jpg](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmhlewc3v/image/upload/v1694430463/childmortality_antenatalcare_ae562afd42.jpg)

# Blogs and AI to make sense of the numbers
Throughout the Child Atlas, we worked hard to present data in an easy-to-use format. A growing number of blogs will tell specific data stories, provide [methodological backgrounds](http://www.childatlas.org/blog/count-every-child), or highlight innovative data projects we are working on. We also use AI-generated explainers throughout the Child Atlas to help make sense of the numbers, which are clearly marketed with a small 'AI' icon. While these help to explain the data in more detail and draw out some key insights, this is an experimental feature and sometimes they are getting things wrong (so please check any such statements).

# Tell us what you think
We are very excited to finally share the Child Atlas with you! We hope that this platform will help you to describe and highlight the situation of children through data - informing strategic decisions, supporting policy or programme interventions and providing key evidence to hold decision-makers accountable. 
We see great potential for the Child Atlas and are already working on improvements. Please get in touch to tell us what you think, how this platform helps you in your work and what you would like to see included in the future. You can write to us directly at [childatlas@savethechildren.org.uk](mailto:childatlas@savethechildren.org.uk). 

The Child Atlas is Save the Children's new data platform to visualise, compare, analyse and understand children’s outcomes globally. The platform puts high-quality, publicly available data at your fingertips. 

Introducing the Child Atlas: Understanding children's lives through the power of data

Imagine a perfect world for women and girls where no girl became a child bride. Such a world would reflect the pink paradise of Barbie land (as seen in the recent Barbie movie directed by Greta Gerwig) in the Child Atlas, painting it all pink. In Barbie land women are empowered, have their rights upheld, and face no gender discrimination. Now, take a look at the Child Atlas below. Transitions from the pink to the purple spectrum in the Atlas depict the grim realities of child marriage across the real world, with data showing the percentage of women (aged 20-24 years) who were married or in union before age 18.

Unlike Barbie land, the real world is far from perfect for girls. As children, girls have a world full of possibilities ahead of them. Once married, their choices are restricted as girls are [often found to experience early pregnancies and take premature responsibilities of unpaid domestic and care work](http://repositorio.minedu.gob.pe/bitstream/handle/20.500.12799/5588/Economic%20impacts%20of%20child%20marriage%20global%20synthesis%20report.pdf). The dreams and aspirations of being educated and having careers like the doctor, lawyer, astronaut, or president Barbies, or to simply have basic rights are threatened for an alarming total of [640 million girls and women living today who have been married as children.](https://data.unicef.org/resources/is-an-end-to-child-marriage-within-reach/), more than 1 in 3 of these child brides live in South Asia.

![child-marriage-map.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmhlewc3v/image/upload/v1694423784/child_marriage_map_55c39af3d3.png)

No region in the world is yet free from the detrimental practise of child marriage and the rates of child marriage are particularly high in some countries and regions than others. The Child Atlas shows that of the top 10 countries with available data of girls facing the highest prevalence of child marriage, 5 are in West and Central Africa, 4 are in Eastern and Southern Africa and 1 is in South Asia. In most of these countries, more than half of the girls are victims of the practise including in Niger (76%), Central African Republic (61%), Mali (54%), Mozambique (53%), and Bangladesh (51%). Notably, all these 10 countries are categorised as [least developed countries](https://unctad.org/topic/least-developed-countries/list) and 8 are [fragile and conflict affected states](https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/608a53dd83f21ef6712b5dfef050b00b-0090082023/original/FCSListFY24-final.pdf), which suggests that countries with more restricted resources are more likely to see higher levels of child marriage. Regional averages show that the most vulnerable girls are found in West and Central Africa, where child marriage rates reach 33% and is closely followed by Eastern and Southern Africa at 32%. South Asia emerges as the next region of concern, with a prevalence rate of 26%, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean at 21%. In contrast, the regional rates of child marriage are lower in Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and in East Asia and the Pacific where the child marriage rates are 16%, 9% and 8% respectively.

Despite child marriage being such a grave issue globally, exploring the data in the Child Atlas reveals an additional problem: data can sometimes be quite old (for instance the latest available data for Brazil in the UNICEF database is from 2006!) and in some countries lacks meaningful disaggregation between different groups of children. But relevant and up-to-date data is essential to tackle the issue, and this indicates the urgency for scaling up investment on data collection to monitor progress and chart the way forward.

Barbie Land is, indeed, a land of dreams where girls do not get married as children and are free to pursue anything they aspire to become. The fact that child marriage is already rarely found in some high-income countries like Belgium or Norway, along with the promising progress made in some low and middle-income countries like Rwanda and Maldives, shines a ray of hope for all girls worldwide. Expedited and targeted policies along with concerted efforts from national and global stakeholders can safeguard the future of girls and women worldwide and eliminate this harmful practice. A Barbie land in the Child Atlas depicting no child marriage is not impossible after all.  

Imagine a perfect world for women and girls where no girl became a child bride. Such a world would reflect the pink paradise of Barbie land in the Child Atlas, painting it all pink. In Barbie land women are empowered, have their rights upheld, and face no gender discrimination. However, the Child Atlas depict a grim reality of child marriage across the real world.

Beyond Barbie Land: the Global Burden of Child Marriage

Children today are growing up facing multiple, overlapping crises like we’ve never seen before.  Across the world, **183 million children face the triple threat of high climate risk, poverty and conflict**. A world still reeling from the human and economic impacts of a global pandemic now faces a **hunger crisis** the size and severity of which has not been seen before – at least 153 million children are facing food insecurity globally.  

The human development progress we have made is in peril. The cost of inaction has become too great, and children are paying the price.  

In 2015, world leaders made 17 promises to children through the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet half-way to the 2030 deadline, delivery is unforgivably off-track.  

[Analysis by Save the Children](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmhlewc3v/raw/upload/v1694790913/SDG_Summit_Methodology_0bab2dd8ac.docx?updated_at=2023-09-15T15:15:14.272Z) shows that unless the current rate of progress rapidly accelerates, by 2030: 
- 3.16m of the 942m children born will not survive to celebrate their 5th birthday 
- Malnutrition will leave more than 1 in 5 babies stunted. 
- 2 in 5 children who start school will not be able to read and understand a simple sentence by age 10. 
- 67m of the 414m girls who should be finishing primary school will marry as children. 
- 2.6 billion – 4 in 5 – children will have experienced at least one extreme climate event including flooding, drought and heatwaves.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Sustainable Development Goals provide the best blueprint the world has for charting a way out of this moment of crisis and tackling the pressures of increasingly frequent climate disasters, conflict, global inequality and hunger. But children are rapidly losing trust in leaders. **Governments must win back that trust, by standing in solidarity with children and taking action with urgency to meet the challenges children will confront in their lifetimes.**

### The SDG Summit must be a gamechanger. Save the Children is calling on governments to:
1. **Announce clear plans to accelerate progress _with and for children_.** Children’s rights and views must be at the centre of efforts and supported by real action. To do this governments must announce clear, time-bound, costed and fully funded plans to deliver the SDGs that include measures to enable safe, full, meaningful and inclusive child participation. 
2. **Unlock new financing and fiscal space for implementation by making the global financial system work for everyone**, including through multilateral cooperation and solidarity in line with the letter and spirit of SDG17 and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. World leaders must deliver and scale up financial commitments on official development assistance and climate finance (inc. for loss & damage), strengthen global tax and debt systems and policies to ensure the wealthy pay their fair share and ensure lower-income countries are able to invest in delivering the Sustainable Development Goals and building climate resilience.
3. **Protecting and increasing investments in children.** This means more and better funding for safety nets, essential health, nutrition, education and child protection services, and policies. These investments will help build a more stable world where children can not only cope during tough times but also reach their full potential and thrive. 

At this year's SDG Summit, Save the Children is calling on world leaders to listen and stand in solidarity with children. The world does not have a moment to lose.  

The SDG Summit must unlock new financing and raise ambition with and for children

Survival is a fundamental human right for every child. The birth of a child brings immeasurable joy to their families. The joy quickly gave way to profound sorrow as the families of an astonishing 5 million children under the age of five worldwide mourned their loss in 2021. 

The primary drivers of this tragic occurrence range from [premature birth and birth complications like birth asphyxia and trauma, to communicable and infectious diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria](https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-children-dying-from-and-what-can-we-do-about-it). [About half of all under-five deaths arise from undernutrition](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.01728/full) in children. Undernutrition makes children more vulnerable by impairing their immunity, which in turn exacerbates the frequency and severity of contracting infectious diseases and increases the recovery period from it. It is truly heartbreaking that most of these lives are lost from preventable causes.

Children born in different parts of the world do not have equal opportunities of survival. This lottery of birth becomes evident when we look at the under-five mortality rate (measured as the probability of a child dying before they reach their fifth birthday, expressed per 1,000 live births) visualized in the Child Atlas. The countries with the top 10 rates of under-five mortality are disproportionately concentrated in eight countries from West and Central Africa—Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Guinea, Mali, Benin, and in two countries from Eastern and Southern Africa— Somalia and South Sudan as depicted by the purple shades in the Atlas. Behind these numbers, families are forever changed.

![child-mortality-map.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmhlewc3v/image/upload/v1694425519/child_mortality_map_b9114addf8.png)

Given the concentration of high-burden countries in the region, it is no surprise to find West and Central Africa as the region with the highest under-five mortality rate in the world with 91 deaths per 1000 live births. This is followed by neighboring Eastern and Southern Africa with 53 deaths per 1000 live births and South Asia with 37 deaths per 1000 live births. In comparison, under-five mortality rates in Western Europe are as low as 4 deaths per 1000 live births.
These national averages also hide sometimes large inequalities within countries – for instance children from the poorest households are on average twice as likely to die before the fifth birthday than those in the richest households. In the country profiles, the Child Atlas shows disaggregated data of under-five mortality by sex and wealth quintile as calculated by the [UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation](https://childmortality.org/). In addition, we directly use household surveys for many low and middle-income countries to show how under-five mortality varies between different subnational regions (and actually between different groups within those regions).

Under-five mortality is not only an important indicator for survival of children past their 5th birthday, but it also provides an overall insight into the health and well-being of the population, shedding a light on maternal and child health, healthcare access, the effectiveness of public health interventions, and socioeconomic development. 

The world is wildly off track to meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and current trends suggest that many countries will fail to meet the specific goal of reducing under-five mortality (to a maximum of 25 deaths per 1000 births). Our estimates suggest that of the 942 million babies born between now and the end of the decade, 31.6 million will not survive to celebrate their 5th birthday. This is a stark reminder of the need for world leaders to turn promises into action, work both for and with children, unlock the finance needed to deliver the SDGs and invest in services and systems that put the needs and rights of children first.

Survival is a fundamental human right for every child. The birth of a child brings immeasurable joy to their families. The joy quickly gave way to profound sorrow as the families of an astonishing 5 million children under the age of five worldwide mourned their loss in 2021.

The Lottery of Birth: Global Differences in Child Survival

Josephat*

We hope that we can build a world where life is good and where no child is left behind.

Legal age of marriage and any exceptions to that legal age

Children living in household that received social transfers or benefits in the last 3 months (%)

CIVICUS rating of civic space (respect in policy and practice for the freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression which are underpinned by the state’s duty to protect civil society)

Children experiencing at least one extreme climate event per year (%)

Children experiencing at least one crop failure per year (%)

Children experiencing at least one tropical cyclone per year (%)

Children experiencing at least one drought per year (%)

Children experiencing at least one wildfire per year (%)

Children experiencing at least one river flood per year (%)

Children experiencing at least one heatwave per year (%)

Probability of a child dying before they reach their first birthday (per 1,000 live births)

Probability of a child dying before they reach their fifth birthday (per 1,000 live births)

Cost of the least expensive locally-available foods to meet requirements for food-based dietary guidelines (in current PPP dollar/person/day)

Population who cannot afford a healthy diet (%)

National guidelines for competencies of health workers in adolescent health

Children living in a conflict zone, defined as proximity of =50km around a violent conflict (%)

Prohibition of corporal punishment in alternative care settings, day care, schools, penal institutions and as sentence for a crime

Index of perceived levels of?public sector corruption from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean)

Interest paid on public debt (% government revenues)

Assessment of debt distress by World Bank and IMF based on the Debt Sustainability Framework

Women (aged 15-49 years) who experienced physical or sexual violence (%)

Children (aged 7-14) who demonstrate foundational numeracy skills (%)

Children (aged 7-14) who demonstrate foundational reading skills (%)

Children and young people (age 5-24 years) currently attending primary education or higher, receiving support for school tuition or other school related support (%)

Number of attacks on students, personnel and institutions

Children attend organised learning programmes one year before the official primary entry age (%) 

Government expenditure on education as percentage of GDP (%)

Expenditure on education as percentage of total government expenditure (%)

Total expenditure on social protection (excluding health) as percentage of government expenditures (%)

Expenditure on social protection systems for children as percentage of government expenditures (%)

Expenditure on social protection systems for children as percentage of GDP (%)

Total expenditure on social protection (excluding health) as percentage of GDP (%)

External health expenditures as percentage of total health expenditures (%)

Population with poor or borderline food consumption according to the Food Consumption Score (%)

Change of food prices compared to corresponding month of the previous year (%)

Policy/legislation on free access to health services for children under 5 years

Policy/legislation on free access to health services for children 5-9 years

Policy/legislation on free access to health services for adolescents 10-19 years

Domestic general government health expenditure as percentage of GDP (%)

Domestic general government health expenditure as percentage of total government expenditure (%)

Domestic general government expenditure on primary health care as percentage of total government expenditures on health (%)

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