Slovenia safest country for children, report shows
Washington, 31 May - Slovenia and Singapore are the safest countries for children to grow up, whereas more than half of all children in the world are at risk of conflicts, poverty and discrimination of girls, according to NGO Save the Children's index End of Childhood, which was published on Wednesday.
Nova Gorica
Children running in the meadow in front of Nova Gorica Town Hall.
Photo: Marko Cencič/STA
File photo
The index measures health and prosperity of children around the globe, taking into account nutrition, access to education, infant mortality, child marriages, child labour, teenage pregnancies and regional conflicts.
This is the second time Slovenia has emerged as the country where such aberrations happen very rarely.
The country recorded 0.5% of child marriages, and a mere 2.1% of children did not go to school.
Fewer than four per 1,000 teenage girls gave birth in Slovenia and not a single child per 100,000 children was murdered.
Singapore had similar results, followed by Norway, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands.
Except for Singapore and South Korea, the top-ten list is dominated by European countries. Countries from Central and West Africa are at the bottom of the list.
As Save the Children said in the report The Many Faces of Exclusion, the situation had improved from last year's report in 95 out of 175 countries, however, it had deteriorated considerably in around 40 countries.