Elsevier

The Lancet

Volume 395, Issue 10224, 22–28 February 2020, Pages 605-658
The Lancet

The Lancet Commissions
A future for the world's children? A WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32540-1Get rights and content

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Executive summary

Despite dramatic improvements in survival, nutrition, and education over recent decades, today's children face an uncertain future. Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, and predatory commercial practices threaten the health and future of children in every country. In 2015, the world's countries agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet nearly 5 years later, few countries have recorded much progress towards achieving them.

The Commission

This Commission reports on urgent and actionable agendas for our children's future. First, we make the case for putting child wellbeing at the centre of SDG policies. Second, we describe what needs to be done: the package of entitlements that governments and other stakeholders should ensure each child receives, and the equity-focused investments and social mobilisation required to make it happen. Third, we describe how global, national, and subnational governance must be reconfigured to provide

Placing children at the centre of SDG policies

Concern for future generations is already at the centre of the SDG endeavour. Here, we further theorise the concept of sustainability around children's health and wellbeing, and existing global frameworks, such as the Survive-Thrive-Transform framework of the Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health (2016–2030).17 We also synthesise the evidence in favour of intervening in childhood to not only achieve child health goals, but also derive key benefits throughout the life

How to ensure that children receive their entitlements?

Putting children at the centre of the SDG agenda will enhance our drive for sustainable development. Here, we define the actions needed to achieve this agenda by laying out a set of entitlements for children and detail the responsibility of families, communities, and governments, required to deliver them (panel 4).

Getting governance right for children

The task of achieving the SDGs should galvanise governments to deliver the rights and entitlements of children and young people, but child advocates and governments must generate the political priority and build fiscal and administrative capacities to do so. In the SDG era three leadership and governance challenges stand out: first, how to move interest in child health beyond the health sector to develop holistic, integrated national policies for children, with augmented governmental capacity

Regulating commercial marketing to children

Unregulated commercial activity poses many well documented threats to children, not least environmental ones. However, commercial marketing of products that are harmful to children represents one of the most underappreciated risks to their health and wellbeing (panel 8). We have examined the harms children suffer from commercial marketing, looked at the insufficiency of voluntary regulation, and propose a political process to control commercial marketing to children by developing an Optional

How to monitor, review, and act on SDG progress for children?

Compared with the Millennium Development Goals, the SDGs encompass a more comprehensive view of development, which poses greater challenges for the data and information required to make the best policy choices, track SDG progress, and ultimately, deliver on the targets of the global goals.320 The data needs for children range from monitoring survival, intervention coverage, and disease prevalence to indicators related to growth, education, and wellbeing, including socioeconomic and

Conclusion

We live in an era like no other. Our children face a future of great opportunity, but they stand on the precipice of a climate crisis. Working together, the world's countries have agreed to the SDG framework to usher future generations into a cleaner, healthier world, but the SDG agenda has yet to gain traction. Our challenge is great and we seem to be paralysed.

This Commission proposes a new global movement to place children at the centre of the SDGs. The CRC is the world's most ratified human

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    *

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