This ground-breaking volume provides an evidence and rights-based approach to monitoring the well-being of children and adolescents in South Africa. Drawing on international precedents, and subject to extensive peer review and revision, experts in various fields have compiled an holistic set of child well-being indicators that will enhance the country's capacity to monitor the status of children. Taking ideological cues from the child-rights focus of the South African Constitution, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of Children, the authors make it clear that it is not just the state of children that is important to measure, but also the contexts within which children grow and develop. Thus the recommended indicators measure both the service environment and the children's developmental contexts. The book has two main sections. The first provides the conceptual underpinnings that inform the development of the rights-based approach to monitoring child well-being and services to children. A range of domains of child well-being are addressed, including: child poverty; the quality of children's neighbourhoods and home environments; child health, HIV and AIDS, mental health and disability; early child development; education; and child protection, which includes abuse and neglect, children in statutory care, children in the justice system, children on the streets and children affected by the worst forms of labour. These areas were chosen because they cover issues of key concern for children in South Africa, and because they are all required for monitoring purposes by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the African Charter, and UNICEF's State of the World's Children Reports. The second part of the volume contains comprehensive tables of indicators together with recommendations for measurement and data sources. Practical and user-friendly, this comprehensive volume provides practical tools for government, policymakers, academics, donors and NGOs to assess how children are doing and whether policies and interventions designed to improve the circumstances of children are effective, efficient and service orientated.
