Monitoring progress toward fulfilling rights in early childhood under the convention on the rights of the child to improve outcomes for children and families

Can the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN-CRC), to which 193 countries are signatory, be used as a tool to support developmental health in the early years? Improving early childhood development (ECD) requires finding ways for social determinants and child rights approaches to work together, which, to date, has not occurred. However, in 2005, the UN-CRC Monitoring Committee issued General Comment 7: Implementing Rights in Early Childhood (GC7) in response to the observation that children under the age of 8 were often overlooked in countries' reporting of progress toward implementing UN-CRC. This chapter shows how a commitment from the UN-CRC Monitoring Committee and key relevant international agencies (WHO, UNICEF) to a long-term program of monitoring compliance with GC7, in conjunction with monitoring of ECD developmental outcomes in all signatory countries, could help move global society toward equity in developmental health from the start of life. © Oxford University Press, 2014.