Slovenia ninth in KidsRights Index
Amsterdam, 19 October - Slovenia ranks ninth in the KidsRights Index Report for 2022, two places down compared to two years ago. The report says that there has been no significant progress in the standards of children's lives and rights across the world over the last decade. The index is topped by Iceland, Sweden and Finland.
Murska Sobota
Kids playing in a kindergarten.
Photo: Marjan Maučec/STA
File photo
In addition to no significant improvements over the past decade, children's "livelihoods have been severely impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic," KidsRights founder and president Marc Dullaert was quoted as saying in the report.
Supply disruptions and hospital closures meant that many children had no access to medications or food during the pandemic, which caused the deaths of some 286,000 children under the age of five.
Moreover, "climate change is also set to severely impact one billion of the world's future generations - half of all children globally - over the next ten years", KidsRights said in a press release.
More than a third of all children, or some 820 million, are at risk of heat waves, while water shortages affect about 920 million children.
What is more, the number of child workers has increased for the first time in two decades, reaching 160 million, 8.4 million more than in the past four years.
The Index is based on five domains: the right to life, the right to health, the right to education, the right to protection and enabling environment for child rights.
UN data-based, it is the only such index measuring the respect of human rights across the world. It is complied in cooperation with the Erasmus University Rotterdam.