Frequently Asked Questions

The KidsRights Index is the annual global index published by the KidsRights Foundation which charts how countries adhere to and are equipped to improve children’s rights.  

The Index covers five domains with a total of 22 indicators. It consolidates the most crucial general children’s rights indicators and implementation requirements of the CRC for which sufficient data is available. 

The KidsRights Index provides a ranking of all states that are parties to the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and for which sufficient data is available. The term ‘states parties’ refers to states that have formally bound themselves to the CRC through ratification or accession. Since 2015, this is the case for 196 states. The United States of America remains the only country that has signed but not ratified the Convention.

As of 2026, the KidsRights Index covers 194 countries. While 196 states are parties to the CRC, the Holy See and Niue are not yet included in the Index due to a lack of adequate data.

All domains from the KidsRights Index have the same weight. This has been deliberately chosen. The performance of countries across all domains of the Index is important for the implementation and compliance with child rights as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.  The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child does not give priority to certain children’s rights; the KidsRights Index also does not. 

The scores for each domain are calculated as the mean of the scores on the underlying indicators. The scores are standardised between a minimum of 0.01 and a maximum of 1. If scores of indicators are missing, then the domain score is calculated over the score of the remaining indicators. 

The total score of the KidsRights Index is calculated as the geometric mean of the scores on the five specific domains. The geometric mean is used, instead of the arithmetic mean, because it makes it more difficult to compensate for low scores on specific domains. Compensation is not desired, because all children’s rights are considered important. An extremely low score in one area of children’s rights, for example on providing an ‘enabling environment for child rights’, can therefore not be compensated with a high score on for example ‘education’. 

The Index is a ranked list of countries, with colour-coding indicating relevant clusters of rankings. There are five different clusters. Cluster 1 contains the best performing countries and Cluster 5 holds the worst performing countries.  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 KidsRights index is not an absolute ranking of countries in which children have the best life, the best living circumstances or the maximum level of respect for their rights. In accordance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the practice of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, in domain 5 of the KidsRights Index countries are scored relatively to their capacity to implement children’s rights. According to article 4 of the CRC, countries need to “take measures to the maximum extent of their available resources” to realize children’s rights. The Index recognizes this principle particularly in its domain 5, which is based on the Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. This will be expressed in the scores of these countries in domain 5 and may have different actual implications for some states as compared to others. 

For example, a highly developed country can be expected to mobilize more resources than a least developed country. Accordingly, in situations in which relatively limited means are available to implement the CRC, political will to genuinely prioritize children’s rights by allocating the maximum/best available budget can make a significant difference. Likewise, certain well-resourced countries might nevertheless have failed to adequately address discrimination of children or may not have been active on gathering disaggregated data on the situation of (particular groups of) children in that country. This explains why in certain situations perhaps rather unexpected scores may be obtained on the KidsRights Index. It also might be caused by the fact that the CRC Committee assesses a state more strictly over time (for example because previous Concluding Observations were not acted upon). 

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. The Index also incorporates the ‘Concluding Observations’ published by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child at the end of the periodic state reporting procedure for all states that have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The United States of America have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child and have therefore not been included in the KidsRights Index. As they have not ratified the Convention they are not legally bound by it and do not report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Thus, no data is available for domain 5 ‘Child Rights Environment’ and the US therefore cannot be included in the KidsRights Index. 

The score for a domain is not calculated if more than half of the indicators of that domain have a missing value. A country is not included in the overall Index if the score on domain 5 ‘Child Rights Environment’ is missing. A country is also not included if more than half of all the domain scores are missing (e.g. when three or more domains are missing). 

The advantage of this new approach is that the scores for the domains and the total Index are now completely based on the most recent available data (i.e. there are no more imputations of missing values based on historical data). Moreover, the restrictions on calculating the domain scores and the overall score make sure that these scores are based on a substantial number of indicators. In the previous versions of the KidsRights Index, the score of countries with many missing values could be based on just a small number of indicators, and therefore be sensitive for very high or low scoring based on a few indicators. 

Recognising the disproportionate impact of climate change on children’s rights, the KidsRights Index team has been experimenting with climate change as a sixth Domain of the Index. This Domain aims to account for the relevant climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts of the countries.  

For the KidsRights Index 2026 we have integrated the Climate Change Mitigation scores from the 2024 Environmental Performance Index. 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”. 

As of 2026, 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.