Early Childhood Education and Development: Implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child

• In Event: Translating Research Into Policies, Educational Reform, and Community Change for Children’s Well-Being

Abstract

Objectives
The Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC) obligates countries to provide services, programs and opportunities for children that will result in best educational and developmental outcomes for children. We have devised a tool to monitor fulfillment of the CRC. The aim of this presentation is to introduce this tool, and to discuss its role in promoting Early Child Development (ECD).

Theoretical framework
To improve the health of their population and decrease inequities in health, societies must invest in children’s early education and development. This investment should include a system of universal protection, respect and fulfillment of human rights of young children.
The United Nations’ CRC is a universal safeguarding system. Adopted in 1989 and with 193 signatory countries, CRC is meant to protect and fulfill the rights of children. The signatory countries are obligated to put through a report on the state of Child Rights to the UN periodically (CRIN, 2009).
In 2006, UNCRC requested a group of researchers, and child rights advocates to develop a set of indicators to monitor the fulfillment of CRC for young children (0-8 years) by the signatory countries.

Method
The indicators are user-friendly guides that will help countries to assess whether the rights of their children are being upheld. They will also promote better data collection, more complete monitoring and, as a result, a much more comprehensive reporting to the UN (Vaghri et al., 2009). The 15 indicators are arranged in clusters based on the Committee’s structured reporting guideline.
Each indicator contains a flow chart that walks the report writer(s) through a series of questions in regards to the existing policies/programs and asks whether these policies/ programs have resulted in any outcomes. In cases where the answer to a given policy/program question is negative, the flow chart provides examples of the model policies/programs from countries across the globe as suggestions.

Results
With the UNCRC’s advice, we planned to pilot the indicators in one country from each category of low, middle and high-income countries. The first pilot was conducted in Tanzania (a low-income country) in 2010 with two main objectives:
a) to identify areas of improvement in the indicators and adjust them.
b) to create a snapshot of existing capacities around child rights in Tanzania.
It was through this pilot that we realized this tool is efficient but time-consuming and that creating an E-version would reduce the time. We developed the E-version in 2011 and currently we are piloting it in Chile (middle-income country). We intend to bring the pilot to Canada (high-income country) in 2012.

Scholarly significance
This work is a concerted attempt to promote ECD by holding the signatory countries accountable to the CRC. The remaining question at this point is whether the bridge that we have built with this work between population health and child rights cultures can be sustained at the international level, such that the efforts of these diverse groups can have a cumulative positive effect on young children over time.

Authors

• Ziba Vaghri, The University of British Columbia

• Clyde Hertzman, The University of British Columbia