Improving international understanding of issues relating to children’s rights by UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre 1:54pm 28th Jun, 2013   More than 100 million children under remain underweight.    The UN Millennium Development Goals set poverty and hunger as critical targets, with underweight children as one of the key indicators. However, more than 100 million children under five remain underweight. What"s been happening?    This edition of Research Watch examines the confusion and controversies around nutrition, wondering why under nutrition is politically and perhaps socially invisible; it looks at weak progress, new ideas, how to deal with India and Africa, and the problems of food security and climate change. Altogether, it brings over one century of expertise. http://www.unicef-irc.org/article/960/    Children with Disabilities    Is there a child who does not dream of being counted and having her or his gifts and talents recognized? No. All children have hopes and dreams - including children with disabilities. And all children deserve a fair chance to make their dreams real.    This edition of The State of the World’s Children includes contributions by young people and parents who show that, when given that chance, children with disabilities are more than capable of overcoming barriers to their inclusion, of taking their rightful place as equal participants in society and of enriching the life of their communities. http://www.unicef-irc.org/article/970/    Improving Child Nutrition: The Report    Poor nutrition in the first 1,000 days of children’s lives can have irreversible consequences. For millions of children, it means they are, forever, stunted. Smaller than their non-stunted peers, stunted children are more susceptible to sickness. In school, they often fall behind in class.    They enter adulthood more likely to become overweight and more prone to non-communicable disease. And when they start work, they often earn less than their non-stunted co-workers. It is difficult to think of a greater injustice than robbing a child, in the womb and in infancy, of the ability to fully develop his or her talents throughout life.    This report shows that we can attain that target. Countries like Ethiopia, Haiti, Nepal, Peru and Rwanda are leading the way, quickly scaling up equity-focused initiatives. Committed to results, they are achieving progress through advocacy, better allocation of resources and investments in tailored policies and programmes. http://www.unicef-irc.org/article/962/    Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) for Children    As part of UNICEF"s continued efforts to generate quality evidence on child poverty and disparities, the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) is a tool developed by the UNICEF Office of Research, with support from Division of Policy and Strategy, to enhance the equity focus of child poverty and deprivation analyses around the world.    MODA adopts a holistic definition of child well-being, concentrating on the access to various goods and services which are crucial for their survival and development. It recognizes that a child"s experience of deprivations is multi-faceted and interrelated, and that such multiple, overlapping deprivations are more likely to occur, and with greater adverse effects, in more socio-economically disadvantaged groups.    MODA builds on UNICEF"s Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities, OPHI"s Multidimensional Poverty Index, and other research carried out in the field of multidimensional poverty. MODA has four main characteristics that may be distinguished from most existing studies:    It selects the child as the unit of analysis, rather than the household, since children experience poverty differently from adults especially with regards to developmental needs;    It adopts a life-cycle approach that reflects the different needs of early childhood, primary childhood and adolescence;    It applies a whole-child oriented approach by measuring the number of deprivations each child experiences simultaneously, revealing those most deprived; and    It enriches knowledge from sector-based approaches through overlapping deprivation analyses and generating profiles in terms of the geographical and socio-economic characteristics of the (multiply) deprived, thereby pointing towards mechanisms for effective policy design.    This web portal contains the following outputs and resources:    Cross-country Deprivation in Children (CC-MODA) analyzes child deprivation for low- and lower-middle income countries according to internationally accepted standards of child well-being, utilizing internationally comparable datasets that contain child-specific information.    National Deprivation in Children (N-MODA) is an application of the MODA methodology to specific national contexts with customized dimensions, thresholds and indicators, utilizing richer information available from national datasets. This section is based on the input of countries carrying out N-MODA and will be regularly updated with new country results.    The "Step-by-step guidelines to MODA" assists in carrying out the entire process of the multidimensional deprivation analysis.    We invite you to visit our website on a regular basis as the results from the analyses on other countries will be added. http://www.unicef-irc.org/MODA/    * In 1988 the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) established in Florence, Italy, the Innocenti Research Centre to support its advocacy for children worldwide and to identify and research current and future areas of UNICEF’s work. The prime objectives of the Office of Research are to improve international understanding of issues relating to children’s rights, and to help facilitate full implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child supporting advocacy worldwide. Visit the related web page
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