The Child Development Index 2012

The Child Development Index (CDI) combines measures of primary school enrolment, child mortality, and nutrition to provide a simple measure of child well-being that can be tracked across time and compared across countries. The CDI monitors child well-being in 141 countries, aggregating data on child mortality, primary-school enrolment, and underweight child data. Published by Save the Children UK (United Kingdom), it can be used as a tool for advocacy.

Case studies focusing on Tanzania (the country that made the most progress, per the CDI), Indonesia, and South Africa are also included. One communication-related activity highlighted in the profile of Tanzania, where 42% of under-fives have stunted growth due to chronic undernutrition: The government has recently introduced a number of measures and is taking an active role in the Scaling up Nutrition (SUN) movement. It has established a Multi-Institutional/Multi-Sectoral High Level Nutrition Steering Committee composed of public, private, civil society, and development partners and chaired by the Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister's office.

Key findings of this new edition of the CDI are:

• Overall, improvement rates in child well-being almost doubled in the first decade of the 21st century. On average, the lives of children around the world improved by more than 30%. This means that the chances of a child going to school were one-third higher, and the chances of an infant dying before their fifth birthday were one-third lower at the end of the 2000s than a decade before. During this period, child well-being improved in 90% of the countries surveyed.
• Developing countries experienced faster rates of progress than developed countries in the same period. Whereas developed countries are very close to the highest score of the ranking, the average child in developing countries is almost 8 times worse off than if she or he had been born in an economically rich country.
• Undernutrition remains one of the main factors holding back progress on children's well-being. Whereas health and education have improved well above the average of the Index, when progress accelerated in the second half of the 2000s (at a rate of 23% and 32%, respectively), in comparison, child undernutrition performed very poorly, improving at the much lower rate of 13%. In the world's economically poorest countries, progress was even weaker, at just below 10%. The proportion of children suffering from wasting (acute weight loss) actually rose in the second half of the 2000s.

Amongst the recommendations offered toward the end of this resource: "Commit to support the generation and use of better data to improve transparency and accountability around these vital issues. This report has also highlighted the weaknesses in basic child well-being data; the same data is, of course, crucial to effective policy responses."