New Issue of the Social Monitor on Social Protection for Child Rights in Central and Eastern Europe

On 20 April, UNICEF is releasing Social Protection for Child Rights and Well-Being in Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, the latest issue of Social Monitor.

The report finds that children are more likely than adults to live in extreme poverty. In addition, children with disabilities, children from minority ethnicities or language groups, and children in rural areas are even more likely to live in extreme poverty and are often unable to access social protection measures.

Despite the challenges, evidence has shown that investing in child-sensitive, integrated social protection systems has myriad positive effects for both individual children and wider society: the realization of children’s rights, increased human capital and national economic growth. Developing rights-based social protection systems also has the effect of reducing horizontal inequalities between different groups of children.

The report tackles these issues, as well as makes key recommendations for policy makers and practitioners in the region, including: reviewing the value of cash transfers to ensure their adequacy, investing more resources in social protection programmes for children, expanding health insurance schemes, and collecting and disaggregating data by age, gender, ethnicity, language and disability status in order to assess the impact of social protection programmes in improving children’s lives and realizing their rights.

UNICEF will host a Twitter chat with Franziska Gassmann from the University of Maastricht, Keetie Roelen from the Centre for Social Protection at IDS and Alexandra Yuster from UNICEF to answer your questions on ensuring that no child is left behind through on 20 April at 13:00 (GMT +1). Follow the hashtag #SocProChat and tweet your comments and questions to these experts.

For further reading on social protection for children, read Elena Gaia’s expert commentary, Leaving No One Behind: Social protection for children from ethnic and linguistic minorities and Keetie Roelen’s expert commentary, Challenging Assumptions: From child-focused to child-sensitive social protection.