Methodology of the KidsRights Index

The KidsRights Index has developed a fully comparable measure of State performance on children’s rights, applicable to all the States Parties to the CRC for which adequate and updated data is available.

Specific child rights issues, such as child marriage or the situation of children in armed conflict, are much more prevalent in some countries than in others. This makes it difficult to arrive at a fair comparison between countries when scoring such issues in an index. In addition, insufficient or non-available data on certain specific issues that do manifest in nearly all countries, such as violence against children or the treatment of refugee children, makes it difficult to measure those issues and/or to arrive at adequately comparable results. While therefore, coverage in the KidsRights Index is not possible, the annual KidsRights Index Reports at times include special features on such issues.

The KidsRights Index focuses on generic issues which in principle are equally relevant for all States Parties to the CRC and for which, on the whole, reliable data are made available consistently. The KidsRights Index rankings are the outcome of an integrated analysis of existing, high-quality data published by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Until the KidsRights Index 2025, twenty indicators formed the basis of the Index. In the KidsRights Index 2026, with the addition of ‘obesity’ and ‘overweight’ as two new indicators in the Domain Health, twenty-two indicators together cover and measure these five Domains. Out of the twenty-two indicators, fifteen indicators are quantitative (Domains 1 to 4) and seven are qualitative (Domain 5).

Calculation of scores for Domains 1 to 4

The scores for Domains 1 to 4 are calculated as the mean of the scores of the underlying indicators. All indicators are standardized between a minimum of 0.01 and a maximum of 1 using a linear scaling technique. If scores are missing for particular indicators, the Domain score is calculated based on the remaining indicators. However, the score for a particular Domain is not calculated if more than half of the indicators of that Domain are missing.

Further, a country is not included in the Index if the score on Domain 5 ‘Enabling Environment for Children’s Rights’ is missing, or if more than half of all the Domain scores are missing (i.e. if the Domain scores are missing for three or more of the five Domains)

Calculation of scores for Domain 5

Domain 5, or the ‘Enabling Environment for Children’s Rights’, is an important and unique Domain of the KidsRights Index. Closely based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it reveals to what extent countries have operationalized the Convention’s general principles and the state of their basic ‘infrastructure’ for developing and implementing children’s rights-based laws and policies. The scores on Domain 5 are derived from the latest Concluding Observations (COs) of the respective States Parties adopted by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. These COs are the final product of the state reporting procedure that monitors the performance of States in implementing the Convention. The COs communicate the views of the CRC Committee on the level of realization of children’s rights achieved in a particular country over a period.

The scores on Domain 5 are generated as follows. First, the Committee’s Concluding Observations are analyzed for remarks about a country’s performance on the seven selected indicators that make up Domain 5:

1. Non-discrimination
2. Best interests of the child
3. Respect for the views of the child/child participation
4. Enabling national legislation
5. Mobilization of the ‘best available’ budget
6. Collection and analysis of disaggregated data
7. State-civil society cooperation for children’s rights.

These seven indicators together represent what can be seen as the general enabling environment, or ‘infrastructure’ for children’s rights that every State Party to the CRC is expected to have in place. The first three (non-discrimination, best interests, and child participation) are general principles of the CRC. The last four (legislation, budget, data, and state civil society cooperation) represent basic elements or tools that States must mobilize to be able to develop and implement child rights policies and to trigger child rights practice. This set of requirements can be applied to all countries in the world, is equally relevant to all countries in the world, and is crucial for creating capacity to implement the CRC. Thus, they form a pertinent and fully comparable measure for children’s rights performance.

For each of the above seven indicators, countries are scored on a scale between 1 and 3. The actual score assigned for each indicator is exclusively based on the language used by the Committee on the Rights of the Child in its Concluding Observations. A score of 1 (or ‘lowest’) implies that the Committee made exclusively negative remarks. A score of 2 (or ‘middle’) implies that the Committee made both negative and positive remarks. A score of 3 (or ‘highest’) implies that the Committee presented exclusively positive remarks. In case the Committee did not address a particular indicator in the Concluding Observations of a particular country, the score of NA (‘not addressed’) applies. The resulting final scores are standardized by using linear scaling technique.

These general principles were identified by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and are supposed to be leading considerations in all CRC implementation efforts. Survival and development of children has been identified as another general principle of the Convention. However, this is of a different (including more substantive) nature than the three other general principles mentioned, and in fact only fully pursued through realizing the Convention as a whole. In that spirit, the general principle of survival and development is integrated into the KidsRights Index via Domains 1 to 4 and not addressed separately again in Domain 5.

Calculation of overall scores, ranks and clusters

Each domain of the Index carries equal weight. The scores for each domain are calculated as the average of the underlying indicators. As explained earlier, all indicators have been standardized using a linear scaling technique. This scaling technique ensures that the score for each indicator ranges between 0.01 and 1. Since all indicators were coded positively, a higher score for each indicator can be associated with a positive contribution to the rights of children.

A country’s total score on the KidsRights Index is calculated as the geometric mean of the scores of the five domains. In general, the geometric mean is used instead of the arithmetic mean because this makes it more difficult to compensate for low scores on specific Domains. This is justified by the argument that such compensation is not desirable, because all the children’s rights aspects covered in the Index are considered equally important. This reasoning is based on the principle that all children’s rights are indivisible, interdependent, and interconnected. Therefore, an extremely low score in one area of children’s rights, for example on providing an ‘enabling environment for children’s rights’, cannot be compensated by a high score, for instance, on ‘education’.

The Index is a ranked list of countries, with colour-coding indicating relevant clusters of rankings. There are five different clusters. Countries in each cluster display a similar performance level. This means that each cluster represents countries for which the scores are in the same range, for example 0.991 to 0.981. Within a cluster, the scores of countries are more similar than across clusters. The clusters are expressed in coloured world maps in the KidsRights Index Report and the KidsRights Index Dashboard.

The 194 countries included in the KidsRights Index are categorized into 5 clusters. Cluster 1 contains the best performing countries and Cluster 5 holds the worst performing countries. Countries that are grouped together in the clusters can be broadly understood as performing at the same level, despite the differences in their respective rankings. Cluster movement of countries is a strong signifier of major improvements or downgrades in the situation of children’s rights in those countries. In this report, cluster insights are provided for the overall KidsRights Index 2026, as well as for each of the domains in their respective sub-sections, along with a granular overview of the cluster groupings at the regional level. These global and regional level cluster insights further help in assessing and contextualizing the progress made in realizing the children’s rights standards set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Climate Change in the KidsRights Index

We have been experimenting with climate change as a sixth Domain of the Index for the past three editions. This Domain aims to account for the relevant climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts of the countries.

Similar to the previous KidsRights Index, for the KidsRights Index 2026 we have again integrated the Climate Change Mitigation scores from the 2024 Environmental Performance Index of Yale University. The indicators that together compose the scores on Climate Change Mitigation “track trends in countries’ emissions of climate pollutants: four greenhouse gases and black carbon”.

The climate change Domain does not yet directly contribute to the results of the overall KidsRights Index over Domains 1 to 5. Because Domain 6 (climate change) is still a work in progress, for the time being it is still kept separate from the overall Index although we do analyze how the results for the new climate change Domain would influence the overall rankings, if fully integrated. Once the work on the climate change Domain will have fully matured it will become a regular and fully integrated component of the KidsRights Index.