About TransMonEE
Monitoring the situation of children and women in Europe and Central Asia
The availability and access to reliable evidence and the latest knowledge on children is a fundamental step in safeguarding their rights.
TransMonEE is a three-decade-old regional partnership initiative among the National Statistics Offices (NSOs) that aims to strengthen the coverage, quality, disaggregation, accessibility and use of data on children across a breadth of areas relevant to children’s rights and well-being, aligned with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The review of the most recent concluding observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child to State parties has pointed out that all countries, without any exception, received at least one recommendation to improve the availability or disaggregation of data on children. The Committee recommended that 41 countries improve data disaggregation while 30 countries must develop or include child-specific indicators in their national data collection frameworks.
Furthermore, the availability of cross-national data is insufficient for many child-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators and other measures of children’s well-being. UNICEF recently undertook a comparative assessment of data availability for the 44 SDG indicators that directly concern children and found that 75 per cent of child-related SDG indicators have insufficient data. The assessment revealed that Europe ranks second worst among regions in terms of the share of indicators for which data are missing.
Against this background, the TransMonEE partnership seeks to enhance the generation, comparability, systematization and integration of statistics and indicators on childhood and adolescence in the region of Europe and Central Asia, as they are instrumental in improving the planning, implementation, and evaluation of policies and programmes for children and adolescents. The partnership contributes to:
- Enhancing technical and methodological capacities for the regular compilation and use of indicators for monitoring the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and child-related SDG targets.
- Promoting data disaggregation (by sex, age, disability, geographic location, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or other markers) to shed light on disparities in access to services and entitlements.
- Supporting governments in improving accessibility, dissemination, and use of quality data and statistics on children to drive effective public policies and investments for children.
- Identifying possible areas of synergy among NSOs, leading institutions for childhood and adolescence, international organizations, and the academic world, and promoting greater collaboration among them to strengthen their capacity for measuring the situation of children in all the countries in the region.
The primary purpose of TransMonEE is to serve as a platform for guiding discussions between NSOs, the main data producers, and policymakers, the main data users, on how to improve the availability, disaggregation, and use of data on children, particularly vulnerable children, usually not well captured in official statistics.
The TransMonEE regional database and website are useful tools for capturing and disseminating vast data on all issues affecting children. While TransMonEE annual meetings serve as a platform where UNICEF, NSOs, and other key partners discuss and reflect on child-related data that is collected or ought to be collected by National Statistical Systems and how data collection systems can be improved to produce better quality and comparable statistics.