“Every Child Counts: Driving Change through Data, Evidence, and Knowledge”

Dr. Shirley Dita, Dr. Lourdes Portus, Usec. Lisa Grace Bersales and distinguished member of the PSSC Board. Magandang umaga. I’m still working on my Filipino. Apologies for that.

It is a pleasure to be here among researchers and the community and to be part of the community of researchers in the Philippines. As I’ve been introduced, I’m a researcher myself and my work is very much to nurture a community of researchers in the Philippines and it is a pleasure I’ve been looking forward to be here today.

In UNICEF, we believe that research on, for and with children is core to policymaking and programming. We think that it’s essential to cultivate  learning community to promote ethical, inclusive, impactful research. That’s why we are eager to partner with the community of researchers and that’s why we are partnering with the PSSC to establish the PCRN. We want to nurture the community that you all belong to, of researcher on children but also connect you to policymakers and make sure that this research in a dynamic country like the Philippines is used. 

In the Philippines, like around the world, UNICEF plays a normative role which is we have to monitor the realization of child rights as enshrined and ensure that international standards for children rights are held, particularly in the UN convention on children rights. The CRC, the Convention on the Rights of Children was ratified in the Philippines in 1990. That was one year after, one of the first countries to ratify in the world and it’s ratified in most countries in the world. 

So, to play that normative role, what do we do as UNICEF? We continuously gather data and evidence to better understand the situation of children and we do that through partnership with institutions like PSSC and with government institutions, civil society, and others. We want to ensure that national policies and programming prioritize children rights and they are grounded in the reality faced by children and the views of children. So that’s why the theme of this congress is very important for us. We believe in participation of children in decision making and I’ll come back to that later. 

We believe that research should be grounded in the CRC, the Convention on the Right of the Child. My presentation today will show how we are taking this approach and children shouldn’t be the subject of research only, they are right holders, whose voice, dignity, age must be respected. But let me deep dive now in the situation of children, which would be my keynote today.

The Philippines has a very dynamic landscape for research. I’ve been four years in the Philippines and amazed by the amount of data, evidence and research that has been produced, and across my four years I’ve been engaging with a range of partners in the country. 

So what we are doing as UNICEF globally and in every country, we do, as I mentioned, a situation analysis of children to understand what are the realities of children. This is done every five years but because of the dynamic environment in the Philippines is so rich we decided to move online and we’re the first UNICEF Philippines to have created a website that pull all the data and my presentation today is just the snippet of what you can find on situationofchildren.org/ph, which I’ll talk about it in the end, where you can find a lot of research.

What I would like for you today as we start this congress is not only to listen to what we’ve gathered but also think about how your research on children can feed in the situation analysis and how it is grounded on some of these child rights and can help enrich. So we want that situation  analysis platform or we call it also SitAn to be a community for a researcher and to be a platform to share knowledge and evidence. 

So before I start with the presentation, we are all researchers and we know how important it is to start with definitions. The CRC defines  the child as below eighteen years old. So all those below eighteen are children but as a matter of research and as you know we look at the child along the life cycle and how we’ve created the age group. And so those age groups are the first thousand days, it starts from conception to the age of two and they have key challenges of brain development, health issues and care practices. Then it goes to early childhood from three to five that are key years of brain development and caring of the child, followed by age group children that are six to nine years old. And then we have adolescents and as you see adolescents go a little bit beyond childhood, it goes one year to twenty to nineteen years old. One of the key things that I want to share also great news is that what we’ve been doing as UNICEF is to partner with PSA, the Philippine Statistics Authority and the government to create a statistical framework for children. So one and this has just been approved … last month by the PSC board which is a framework… that identifies a grade indicator for children, so we didn’t have that. All children indicators like over a hundred indicators were spread across government agencies collected through multiple… chain of mechanism from survey, from administrative data system with a lot of gaps across. So what we have done is to work with all government agencies to agree on the indicators that should be collected, have what mechanism and agreed on the gaps and how like them working on the gaps, so that’s the agreement of the government to see. We will collect those indicators on children and this is now available. So which is quite a breakthrough in gathering data for children.

Let me first talk about demographics because I’m not sure everyone is up to speed. We know that children compromise 36.5% of the population in the Philippines. This means two in every Filipino is a child that means 40 million children. As you can see on the map, it is not the same everywhere. So when you look at BARMM almost half of the population are children, Bicol has over 40% of children and Zamboanga Peninsula has 39.8%. We see a lot of variation across the regional representation. NCR has the lowest proportion of children however if you look at the overall children population and the number of children in the Philippines, the higher number is in NCR. So this is just giving some context. But this, as we all researchers know,is meant to be the age pyramid, so the first one is 2020, the second one is 2030 and 2055. What do you notice? The first is the pyramid with a lot of children at the bottom. By 2030, we will have fewer children and then we have a mushroom and we know what that means. As social scientists, we know that that means a demographic shift which means that we are shifting and we need to get  a demographic dividend because later on the population will be aging so we have a country where a large proportion is of working age but then as you look at the japanese one it’s all up and so that means there would be a lot more older people and few young people, so we have to invest. The key message is to invest in children because they’re going to be the ones supporting the future of the community. This is the time we are not in a society, we transform you in a society that has a lot of children to fewer children. So this is key.

What we always already also see is that four—nearly four in ten children live in cities. This is different, like growing urbanization in the Philippines. And so that’s a major implication with the environment and we will come later when we look at climate impact in the environmental community in which they work. 

Another key indicator, like an important factor, is almost 2% of the population and that’s an estimate, that is a key challenge that we have to understand how many children with disabilities live in the country. But 2 million for a country of, recently, 114 million people that is above 2 million children living in disability. And we’ve done a recent study on the cost of raising a child with disability that highlighted that families with children with disability are facing significantly higher costs to meet the basic needs of children. And this higher cost have impact on the family income pushing them closer or sometimes down to poverty. So this is key to very much address the needs of children with disabilities. 

So I’ll look at child rights and I’ll try to quickly go through five lenses through five dimensions of child rights as defined by the convention of the rights of the child.

Let’s start with Survive and Thrive, this covers health and nutrition issues So first the good news is that we see progress in health. Anemia and Vitamin A deficiency among pregnant and lactating women is going down so that is good for mothers. Adolescent fertility and teenage pregnancy where less adolescents are having kids, this is good. Skilled health and facility-based delivery, which means mothers are delivering their babies in hospital or in a health care center, that is better than at home so there is more care for them. All these signs are good progress and you see skilled attendants going up which are all great signs but what we do not see is the stagnation of child mortality and let us look at the three types of child mortality. We have narrowed it to neonatal mortality, that’s like the first months of life and then the infant mortality is the first year, if their chance of dying is under the first year. So under five mortality the rate is fluctuating, you see since 2008, we can see little progress. We should see less children dying at an early age. And because we see more skilled attendants we see this progress. So when we look at regions, neonatal mortality is where we are breaking down. So within the first months of life you can see a lot of  fluctuation across regions. In infant mortality within the first year we see a lot of stagnation. This is where we see much progress in the country in the region of BARMM, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslims Mindanao. We have seen significant decreases across the three types of mortality and they are getting to the same level for the rest of the country as we know they were much higher. So this type of information,from seeing skilled attendants to improvement in access but child mortality is not decreasing give us one information, quality. We see people are accessing services, but child mortality still does not decrease. So it suggests a problem with the quality of services. Access is improving but quality is not. 

So why are children dying? Most causes are infectious and parasitic disease, many of those are preventable through vaccines. And what we see is that in the country whose overall vaccine coverage of basic antigen increased from 70 to 72%, however it is still below the 95% of immunity. So if 95% of the community is vaccinated, diseases will not spread across the country. But if vaccination is below, there is a chance, and we have seen polio and measles outbreaks still happening in the Philippines and that is because of the challenge with the coverage of vaccines. One of the things that we see is differences in the country. 

The immunization is part of the work that we wanted to showcase to indicate some of the work that we will be publishing soon, and I think, for all researchers it is interesting, where we’ve tried to look at all indicators for children. This is for health, that we have at a national level and what we can go down to is by region. One of the key challenges in the country is having indicators at the subnational and local level, and trying to put them at par. So creating indexes and one of the things that you see BARMM for immunization is they are in the red at 9.9%, but what we see is mortality is not the worst. Under five mortality is not the worst, there is an area of research for you and it is where we see under five mortality being high, but access being high as well. So how come we should be seeing a link between that and better understanding the different intersections and the challenge at the local level.

So here, one in five children have zero dose, and have not been vaccinated at all. So we have 10% of the population, but in BARMM it’s 6 out of 10, so 60% haven’t been vaccinated.

Another aspect of health that I wanted to touch upon because that’s the key area we would want to see more research, is around mental health. It’s a growing concern in the country. We see that suicide ideation that means children that have thoughts about suicide has increased significantly. Of course, we have seen during COVID, and we all know that during COVID, this was tough on all of us. And we have seen levels of anxiety and we have research that demonstrates that it went down, but it’s still higher than pre-pandemic and it still remains an issue to be researched and to better understand in the Philippine context.

Looking at bottlenecks, one of the things not just looking at the situation. What causes this lack of progress or where we can progress, and that’s also another area of research. For health, what we see is varying levels of knowledge and capacity, particularly at the local level. We know at a decentralized level, this is local level, health workers, local government units, capacity it’s still a major issue. Inadequate quality of services are mentioned also what we see is behavior, social behavior change is becoming central. Understanding healthy behavior is a key to addressing those shifts. Supply chain, we still see too much out of stock essential medicines and fragmented information systems. 

Another aspect of health that survives and thrives is nutrition. Stunting has long been an issue in the Philippines and a stunted child is not the appropriate height for their age. So, the growth of height, especially at the younger age dictates the development boost of physical and cognitive underdevelopment of the child. This is critical for a country, if you want to address building human capital because it links brain development to the capacity of a child to be an active member in society. The World Health Organization defines…and that is what you will see in the graph, the very high that’s like the level defined by the World Health Organization. The orange is 30% are very high, high at 20% and 10%. The Philippines is still in the top 10 globally for stunting. It went down in around 2018 below very high, but we still see that it’s high. We have seen much progress between 2021 and 2023—and this is from the National Nutrition Survey—it’s still at 23.6%, and again, BARMM is lagging much behind with 34.4% of children stunted. So, much progress is needed. Another key issue of nutrition—one of the things that is interesting is that 9 out of 10 children are able to eat that means children eat. They have food everyday on the table. It’s not a food security issue, but one in ten receive the minimal acceptable diet that means they do not eat the right nutritious food. This shows us that malnutrition is not about food security, but it is about poor diet and we have a key issue of the food environment in which we are. 

Another key and last aspect of nutrition that we see as a growing concern in the Philippines is overweight and obesity which is rapidly rising in the Philippines. So you see, compared to stunting, it is not as high, but it is growing more and more and according to the WHO again, standard and the global standard it’s quite high. UNICEF just published a report globally that for the first time, childhood overweight and obesity has surpassed underweight of children. So globally, we have more children obese than children underweight. This is a major concern that is driven by harmful food environments and not personal choice. And I think as children you know that the food environment, like having healthy food in your everyday life, can become a challenge in the Philippines. 

Breaking it down, overweight and obesity is more common in urban areas among boys rather than girls and among higher education. So stunting is a problem among the poor, but overweight is among the richer part of the community. 82% of adolescents are insufficiently, physically active as well. So what do we see as a bottleneck for nutrition? So the food environment, as I mentioned, is crucial and understanding, if you can do research and how to break the cycle of the food environment. The high cost of healthy food, the easier availability of processed food, the limited access to fresh vegetables and protein is a challenge. A UNICEF study found that one third of complementary baby food in the Philippines contain added sugar. This is a major issue, and if children have been fed sugar as infants, that fosters unhealthy craving and then leads to obesity later. So there is a whole cycle that we need to break and research on this will help. 

We also see other issues, but I will move on to Learn, the next dimension. 

So education and brief…we will look at a few issues. For the first time we have the ECDI, the Early Childhood Development Index, and this was collected as part of the demographic and health survey, which was conducted in 2022 and soon, you know we’re working with PSA and in the coming months, they will start the data collections for NGHS 2025, which will have the data next year and hopefully, next year, we will have updated data on all the health and nutrition indicator but also on early childhood. What does that tell us?

These indicators, by looking at the development of the child 3 to 5 and to see their cognitive motor skills all of this is on track. We see that 3 quarters of children are on track but still we have one quarter that is not on track. That’s based on a survey. We see, regionally, a lot of these variations again, BARMM is the lowest at 46.6% much lower than other regions. What we also see and learn is the access, the attendance. So again we look at the issue of do we see the realization? are they developmentally on track? how are they accessing the services to make sure they are actively on track? What we see is low attendance,in Region 9 and in BARMM. So the challenge is that we have evidence in the Philippines and globally that children who go to pre school do better once they enter primary school.

We conducted a cohort study. We followed children from early childhood to grade five and they demonstrated that they perform much better in grade five if they have gone in early childhood. So access is crucial. When we look at school attendance overall, from grade one or kindergarten all the way to grade twelve, we see that six to twelve is okay, ten—twelve to fifteen is okay,  but sixteen to seventeen—we see a lot of out of school adolescents and we particularly see among boys. They have to go learning, and that is what we are trying to address with ALS, Alternative learning systems, and other mechanisms to compensate for this loss. 

Quality is another concern, here you have another elementary rate, you see the variation in terms of years of the attendance, wherein there is high attendance rate in elementary, junior high school is still high, kindergarten is varying but the problem is senior high school where it is much lower. This is the result of the PISA, an international assessment of where 15 years old are tested on reading, math, and science. For kids in year five it has been done in 2018 and 2022 and will be done again soon. One of the things that is troubling is the number here in the Philippines is lower than the average. ASEAN, is much in the region, the Southeast Asia region, if we are below it, we are below the OECD, the global standard. So the performance of the Filipino scored below the average and with girls slightly better than boys, but we are all significantly behind. So we see that as a key pattern. Again access but not quality. Children are not learning, or are they learning?

Another key study is the Southeast Asia primary learning matrix that is among Southeast Asian and ASEAN countries that UNICEF is promoting. We are done in 2019 and we are about to release it later this year or early next year, the next round. What it shows is that 83% of children, the second worst in the region, are children in the primary level, and that’s looking at primary, not learning math. They are not performing to the level they are supposed to perform. And for reading, 90% of children are not able to read to the level they are supposed to read. So, how come we are not achieving the learning outcome for children?

What do we see as the key bottleneck for education? In early childhood and other, the lack of daycare centers. You have seen lower access still being a challenge and that iss where we need investment from local government units and we are making national investment policies but how do we make it realized at local level? Shortage of quality teachers? Poverty? Perception of early childhood education is also an issue among families and that would be an interesting area of research and limited resources for children with disability.

Moving on to the third area and one of the important areas of gap in research, is protection, the right to be protected from violence, abuse, exploitation and poor practices. What we see here is three in five against the DHS. The DHS is a great source of findings and in the next DHS, we see that three in five children, ages 1 to 14 have experienced violence. So children are sometimes in a violent environment at home, at school, and online; they are experiencing different levels of violence. This data was coming right outside of COVID, like it was in 2022. It will be very interesting when we get the result of this new round of survey. Has that changed since that time and can we tell that our children still experience that violent environment?

We see that 1 in 10 girls age 15 to 19 experience physical and sexual violence, this is a very concerning statistics. No girls should be experiencing that and we still see 10% of girls experiencing it .

Here I want to show that we’ve been working on a longitudinal cohort study of Filipino children. This is very interesting research for all of you researchers because it’s been gathering data and following a group of 5000 children, representing a sample of children across the country. From the age of 10 we will be following them until the age of 25. It started in 2016, and it is around the SDG. So starting at the year of 2016 we will finish at the end of the SDG in 2030. And we have been doing data collection every couple of years on all those children. And we are able to track for every child, their performance as a whole range of indicators including violence. This is where it brings us interesting data. It shows the violence experienced among boys and girls, orange is for boys and red is for girls, and we see physical violence is higher among boys. What we see is at the age of 10 in 2016 they experience it the highest and then with the age going up violence rates goes down. So why at the age of 10 are children experiencing much more violence? And what we are hoping to understand is, those children that experience violence at the age of 10, are they experiencing it throughout? Is it the same children that experience it? Is it different? And what is the impact of that violence on their school learning outcome, and on their health?

So, you can see in the two graphs, this one is by friends and peers, so it is higher by peers. And then the next one is by parents, and that is lower, but they are still experiencing violence either by their peers or by their parents. This is emotionalism, the first one is physical violence, this one is emotional violence. This is as important, we can really say that physical is more important than emotional. We know how emotional violence can impact a child and can impact each of us so much in our well-being. So again, boys and girls, what we see is that girls are experiencing high levels of emotional violence, but it also decreased, and this is less shifted across the year, but that’s by parents and this is by classmates. So you see, emotional violence still seems to be continuous, not less than physical.

What we can also see here is the reported case of child abuse by the child protection network. What we see is that majority of the cases is sexual abuse that gets reported. The majority or huge number of cases we see between 2021 and 2024 is 28,700 cases reported in the country and we can see the trend is increasing. This is alarming. What we also see is—before that, I mentioned the PISA before, one study that was published later last year by PIDS that is important to note is around bullying in school. Ensuring that the Philippines has the highest number of bullying rates among children in school. That has a significant impact on learning outcomes. So I would recommend that you also look at that study.

In terms of another issue in the Philippines, violence happens at home, at school, and online.That is one of the key issues that we have seen in the Philippines. You all have facebook and social media on your phone that has a lot of online gaming and as we see the increase in access and we see an increase also in violence. We estimate about 20% of internet using children and adolescent age 12 to 17 are victims of grave online sexual abuse and exploitation.

Another key element in protection is what we call harmful practices; one is child marriage. We see that we still have 73,000 cases of child marriage in the Philippines, and it persists beyond the law. You remember that now, there is a law in the Philippines that legalizes marriage at the age of 18 with parental consent. Girls and a number of boys, and we have seen in different parts of the country, face major challenges. On child labor, we still see 513,000 or in 2022 data showing 828,000 child working and in hazardous work, which is also linked to education challenges. 

So what are the key bottlenecks? Protection. Why are we not addressing this issue of violence? One of the issues that we have addressed and it is the main one that we are trying to address is the fragmented child protection system. If you look at the way the government is structured,it is issue based and it is fragmented across with many different services rather than harmonized for a child, a parent and their caretaker to help a child to address this issue of violence. And so there is social work and it is very fragmented. One of the things we are trying to do is to harmonize across the government and local government level  the child protection system. And we are about to start modelling in full LGU to see how the integration can address all issues and not address only one issue at a time. They all fall back to the child and how we have child protection services and data remains another key issue and that is why we need research.

The fourth area is a safe and sustainable environment. We talked about the weather, we talked about the typhoon, the Philippines is known for that climate. The Philippines, as we know, is the number one on the world risk index. A study done in Nature magazine found that the youth in the Philippines reported the highest level of what they call echo anxiety. This is important. We are talking about body and people, and we are talking about participation; how do they feel. Feelings of children in the Philippines, and maybe the children here can tell us, and I have a daughter and it’s just like you know, I also see a lot of children at school, they all care about the environment, they are worried about their future and that is a key issue. And in the Philippines, it is a key challenge because you are so vulnerable to climate, in multiple risk and multiple viability. And what we are trying to do is analyze and call for another research for you to understand the impact of climate on children. We will be releasing the climate landscape analysis for children soon in November, which is an analysis where we have gathered all the intelligence that is available. This is not primary data research for you guys, but it is more like a compilation of work that we know about the impact on children in the Philippines and trying to estimate it. 

What we see is that by 2030 national studies have shown that up to 11 million will be impacted by extreme weather, extreme heat and we see schools being closed because of the heat in May. Up to 5 million people were affected by flooding and then typhoon 6,150,000  which also caused sea level rise. What does it mean in terms of children?

And that is where we train to quantify and qualify and that area of research is one of the access to essential services, school. If you are a parent or a child, how many times has your school been closed because of climate and then it ends up by PAGASA trying to forecast etc., but it has an impact on school. The estimation by PIDS is that 32 days of school are impacted by the climate in average a year, that is huge. It is a month and a half of schooling that is  lost. 

We have vectorborne disease. If you have seen cases of dengue in Quezon city increasing, we also see a lot of different statistics. Water scarcity, the exposure to the hazard when typhoons come, we see regions that have been impacted over and over with the school being destroyed, and impact on essential access to essential services. But we also have longitudinal cohorts that show us the impact on violence. We see increase of violence when they are linked to climate

One of the things, and this is to show the climate landscape analysis for children. What we have done is we have looked at the exposure—at all the different hazards like typhoons, heat, etc. based on the map and seeing who are most affected. So you see that in the north, Bicol is the most affected because of typhoons, and statistically speaking, there is more work. This one is a work that I mentioned, what we call equity analysis where we transform indexes on all the child rights that I am presenting into indexes trying to measure them, to compare them, and show which region children are fairing the worst. And you see none surprising, you’ve heard me, BARMM, BARMM, BARMM. BARMM and the Zamboanga Peninsula, but where children are faring better is NCR. When we overlay these two and we say where the children are the most vulnerable to climate our effort, Bicol region. That is where we see the most vulnerable and to multiple hazards and all the country, and the thing is that the challenge with this map, and we’re overlaying so many indexes, is you just do not see the granularity, but we can tell that Bicol and NCR as well because when we overlay the indicators it shows that it is the most vulnerable to hazards.

Another aspect to a safe and sustainable environment is water and sanitation. Water and sanitation is key to health outcomes, to well-being and what we have seen is there is a good performance in the basic access to drinking water, basic access to sanitation and basic access to hygiene. So the lighter blue and the dark blue means that there is 90% in 2024, you can see the progress between 2015 and 2024. So in a 10-year, almost 9 year period we have seen it go up. The challenge is when you see the dark blue, it is safely managed. Safely managed means that it is not accessed from a bottle,but access from what you have. So basic water means less than 15 minutes away from an improved source such as, well and produced spring, so that means you have to go out. But safely managed means that the water is accessible, available and free from contamination. So that means it is healthy, because you can still have basic access but it can be contaminated. We have a big issue with water quality testing in the Philippines and that is an issue we are trying to address, but it is costly. And that would be a key challenge

The other one, sanitation and hygiene where we still see issues in terms of hygiene. We can see high rates of open defecation in BARMM for instance. In terms of school, we see that 85% of schools have access to at least basic sanitation, but only 47 have access to at least basic water. So you see that the water has zero stars. So there is a star approach, I do not know if you are familiar, but all your schools are rated from zero to three and that is like the basic access and we can see that water access is still an issue in schools.

So the key issue we see is coordination around the government. There is not a single national agency, and the LGUs provide. I have heard of many stories in LGUs where there are challenges of establishing water systems, etc. because different parts of the government are not agreeing, so coordination is a key part. Prioritization and others. Data is still lacking. We don’t have a key but you know the CBMS, Community Based Monitoring System was conducted last year. We are working with PSA, and in two weeks we have the first CBMS conference, and we are hoping to get data soon from CBMS, which includes water access. So we are hoping to have new numbers, which will be published on the situation website.

Another dimension is equitable opportunity in life. The Philippines is geared to be an upper middle income country in a couple of years, the level of the country is becoming richer and richer. But what we see is the issue of child poverty.

One of the key interesting data as you can see are those bubbles. So, this is the rate of child poverty by region. What we see is the size of the bubble in the number of children that are poor. We see it going down across the years from 2018, 2018 is going down, 2021 there is a big jump and 2023 is stabilizing, but it is still going down. Again the region of BARMM, you see how it has dropped between 2020 and 2021. One of the things that we see is the peace dividend. Between 2018 and 2021, BARMM was established, there was peace, there was no more conflict there and we saw it being able to establish a system and address child poverty. However, the bubble did not decrease, so there are still as many children that are living in poor families, but they are not increasing compared to the population. 

So this is a different slide, for social insurance, we see that eligible children for 4Ps is increasing. There is a good number—we have 8.7 million in social protection. One of the things that I want to look at and we also look through this sector is how much the government is putting for the social sector, how much the government is putting for children, and that’s across looking at the health budget here—education and social protection, those key sectors.

What we see is that, the red line is the global standard of how much a government or the percentage of the budget of the government should be put for health and for education. For education, we have reached the sector where the government is putting the money that it is meant to put in education properly. Health and social protection  is still below. The government is making the investment in terms of number, how much money. One of the challenges is how that money is being spent, and that is one of the key issues. Are they able to spend the money adequately and to meet their needs? So that is where we are working, and we have key bottlenecks as well which is like a key again to local capacity.

The final one is participation right. This is important and I think this is asking the children more than me that is presenting here. What we see is that we have a few indicators, we have good civil registration but it still remains 5-6% of the population,there are still some who do not have  access to the internet. One of the things here is child participation that is still an issue that we want to learn more about. We are doing a lot of participation, one of the areas. I was in a meeting recently with the government and we need to better understand the structure for participation at the community level. You have, I’m not an expert but I know that there is SK, there is YC, and the youth groups. How are they all connected and how these organizations work and where it is working? What is the combination to be able to strengthen the participation because sometimes there are a lot of different mechanisms but how this is bringing full participation and not statistics. 

I want to leave you with one of the last data points and that is from the longitudinal cohort study. It shows that we have been collecting happiness, and how across the year, those children are happy. Great news, they are happy, but we know that happiness for a child varies from day to day. And if you are asking, are you happy today? But tomorrow that might vary. But still, across the youth, it’s high. 

What is most interesting here is why are you happy or why are you not? What makes you unhappy? And happiness—this is the reason for happiness, if you look online or if many researchers know, there is a global research study in the United States that looked into happiness at a core. It started over a year, hundred years ago, and of course, hundred years ago, it was just men that were interviewed, but now there are women in there but it is looking at asking a whole range of people from health and everything. They identified one factor that resonates there that influences happiness–-It’s connection with others. What we see is what makes us most happy. The yellow part that is higher and that you see going up is being with family, being with peers, friends, and classmates. And this is one of the key things—how do we create communities? What do we do to reach communities because we see in this day and age of virtual, we see how organizations impact the level of happiness and connection. The level, the reason for unhappiness relates to the dimension that I presented before, it’s violence. And, what you see is that it is about being scolded and being bullied. Again, we see the trend for violence, it is going down for the age of 10 and the age of 18. Conflict with peers is one of the key factors that impact children.

So I hope that I did not lose you, there is a lot of data out there, and it is all in the situationofchildren.com/ph website. You can access it, you have over hundred indicators and there are across seven areas. We have 200 documents and I know that we are missing a lot of your research there. We wanted to be a platform to show that we have research around children that is available. You can also get maps and we will be publishing the climate landscape for children where you also can access the highlights. So each year we update. Also when we launch the SitAn site, we have an event where my boss presented in the same format, The presentation showed that, that was the last year’s data that has not been updated and we hope that in the rich environment next year DHS data, CBMS data, all these data point will give us new picture and a new opportunity to do some research. I want to also highlight the longitudinal cohort study, which I have mentioned, all that is open data, you can request access to the data. There are a lot of data points and  a lot of dimensions that we are looking for help to do that research.

I always see, whenever I see PhD students say that you do not have to do primary data collection, instead what you have to do is do the analysis then come to us and share your data or analysis. We also have saferkidsph of online sexual abuse and exploitation, a lot of data that was collected.

So with that, it is a pleasure for me and I am looking forward to these 2 and a half days to listen to you as you listen to me and to hear all your research, learn and give back to my colleagues. Tomorrow some of my colleagues will be coming and sharing more of our research that we are doing and we are hoping that we can build a research community and really understand better the situation of children—better understand their life and have the views of children to be able to improve and go towards the realization of child rights in the Philippines.