Global Child Index

Beta v1.1

A transparent, evidence-based index of how countries are doing for children, computed from published international indicators. Every figure is traceable to its source, and countries without enough verified data are shown honestly as provisional rather than ranked on partial evidence.

Data: World Bank World Development Indicators, which republish custodian series from UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, UNODC, UN IGME, the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, GBD/IHME and others — each indicator below names its custodian. Data refreshed: 26 Oct 2026 · refreshed automatically every 24 hours.

What changed in v1.1 — the ruler grew, not the countries

Index v1.1 expands the indicator set from 9 to 16 and adds two domains — Protection and Environment & Exposure. Children are now measured not only on survival, schooling and material conditions, but also on whether their births are registered, whether girls are married as children, the lethal-violence environment they grow up in, the air they breathe and the smoke in their homes. The scoring formula and the 70% coverage bar are unchanged from v1.0; only the indicator set grew.

That growth moves scores and ranks even where nothing about a country has changed, so please read version-to-version movement as two separate things: a methodology effect (new indicators now count) and a data effect (values on the original indicators were revised). Nigeria is the worked example: its overall score is essentially unchanged (56.6 in v1.0), yet its rank falls because the expanded set now prices in its weakest measured conditions — air pollution and household smoke — and because more countries are ranked. Canada illustrates the other side: its coverage now sits exactly at the 70% bar because some UNICEF survey programmes (wasting, child marriage) do not run in Canada at all. Coverage measures the data we hold, never a country’s performance. Country profile pages decompose each country’s v1.0→v1.1 change into its methodology and data effects. The complete v1.0 table remains permanently available in the v1.0 archive.

What the Index measures

The Index follows children’s lives across six domains — the same domains used in the methodology below:

• Health & Nutrition — whether young children survive, are immunised and grow: the under-5 mortality rate, stunting and wasting prevalence, and DTP3 immunization coverage.
• Education — whether children are in school and gaining basic skills: net primary and secondary school enrolment and the youth literacy rate (ages 15–24).
• Poverty & Water — the material conditions children grow up in: the poverty headcount at $2.15 a day and access to safely managed drinking water.
• Adolescent & Digital — the transitions of adolescence: the adolescent fertility rate and the share of individuals using the internet.
• Protection — whether children are legally visible and safe: birth registration completeness, the share of women first married by age 18, and the intentional homicide rate (the lethal-violence environment children grow up in).
• Environment & Exposure — what children breathe: mean PM2.5 air pollution exposure and access to clean fuels for cooking (household smoke is a leading cause of under-5 pneumonia deaths).

Rankings — countries with at least 70% indicator coverage

Provisional — insufficient coverage to rank

These countries have some data but fall below the 70% coverage threshold, so CIJ does not publish a rank for them yet. Scores shown are provisional.

Methodology

The Index (v1.1) uses 16 indicators across six domains (Health & Nutrition, Education, Poverty & Water, Adolescent & Digital, Protection, Environment & Exposure). For each indicator we take the most recent value published for 2010–2025 and convert it to a 0–100 score using fixed bounds, documented below. A country’s score is the mean of its available indicator scores; coverage is the share of the 16 indicators with a recent value. Nothing is imputed: missing data reduces coverage, never the honesty of the score.

All series are drawn from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, which republish the custodian sources named above. Some child-protection data — for example trafficking — is deliberately not scored: counts of detected trafficking victims measure detection and enforcement capacity, not prevalence, so CIJ shows such data as context on country profiles rather than baking it into ranks.

Previous version: Global Child Index v1.0 archive (9 indicators, 4 domains) — kept permanently so every earlier rank remains checkable.