Situation Analysis of children and adolescents in Croatia

SitAn UNICEF Croatia

PROJECT CO-ORDINATOR

Veronica Sandu

PROJECT TEAM AT THE EUROPEAN CENTRE

Magdi Birtha, Rahel Kahlert

BACKGROUND

The Situation Analysis of children’s rights and wellbeing is a flagship product designed to inform policy dialogue, partnerships and interventions to improve the lives of children. It is an assessment and analysis of the country situation, with respect to children's rights and critical issues affecting their realization. The Situation Analysis is a crucial part of the child rights monitoring (CRM) framework and represents a key UNICEF programmatic output that helps focus on knowledge gaps related to inequities and child deprivations. The Situation Analysis will inform policy dialogue and child-focused policy advocacy to make an important contribution to accelerating the achievement of child-related goals with equity.

AIMS

The Situation Analysis had the following objectives:

Develop a deep understanding of the situation of children and adolescents by analysing the policies and strategies and the social and economic trends affecting them.
Identify and analyse the barriers and bottlenecks that prevent disadvantaged children and families from benefiting from social services across sectors.
Provide national government partners with comprehensive equity-sensitive and evidence-based analysis on children and adolescents for result-based decision-making.
Provide essential information to non-government partners to be used in their planning and interventions to address the most urgent issues affecting children and adolescents in Croatia.
Contribute to the (re)formulation of key national strategies so that the priorities for the most disadvantaged children and adolescents are integrated into the socio-economic development agenda.
Identify critical data gaps and contribute to the generation of evidence that can improve the monitoring of rights of children and adolescents, especially for the most vulnerable groups.

METHODS

The Situation Analysis draws on an extensive desk review, including examination of a wide range of national and regional legislations and regulations, plans, studies, reports and statistics. In addition, the Situation Analysis consulted a diverse range of actors through key informant interviews. The interviewees contributed with their first-hand knowledge and thus complemented the information collected through desk research and secondary data analysis. The following actors have been consulted:

Central and local government institutions.
Civil Society and non-profit organizations working with children and/or representing children, with a focus on the most marginalized.
Experts, researchers, think-tanks and academia working on child-related subjects.

ACTIVITIES/MILESTONES

The project was divided into three phases:

Inception phase, which was concluded with the presentation of an inception report and an inception workshop.
Preliminary analysis phase, which consisted of two parts:
- Desk research.
- Primary data collection.

The preliminary phase presentated the preliminary results report.

Drafting and presentation of the Situation Analysis report phase.

The report has two versions, a comprehensive one and a summary version. The summary report was validated with the reference group and key partners. The final summary report consolidated comments of the validation process.