Adolescence

HALLENGES ANDRealizing the rights of adolescents and advancing their development requiresa keen understanding of their current circumstances. Using the latest availabledata from international surveys, supplemented by national sources and researchstudies where appropriate, this chapter examines the state of adolescent healthand education before looking at gender and protection issues.At the international level, the evidence base on middle childhood(5–9 years) and adolescents (10–19 years) is considerablythinner than it is for early childhood (0–4 years). Thisrelative paucity of data derives from several factors. Thesurvival and health care of children under five years – thetime of greatest mortality risk for individuals – has been atthe cornerstone of international efforts to protect and carefor children for more than six decades. In recent decades,vast leaps have taken place in the collection of health data,driven by the child survival revolution of the 1980s, the 1990World Summit for Children, the Convention on the Rightsof the Child and the push for the MDGs. Consequently,national and international health information systems forchildren mostly focus on the early years, concentrating onsuch indicators as neonatal deaths, infant immunization andunderweight prevalence among under-fives.Health information on adolescents, by contrast, is notwidely available in many developing countries apart fromindicators on sexual and reproductive health collectedby major international health surveys, particularly in thecontext of HIV and AIDS. Where health data on adolescenceare available, it is often not disaggregated by sex,age cohort or other factors that could give much-neededdetails on the situation of adolescents.Education presents a similar story. The decades-long internationaldrive for universal primary education and, morerecently, for early childhood development has fostered thedevelopment of indicators and analysis of education in thefirst decade of life. This is most welcome, and it reflects thegrowing and sustained commitment of international andnational stakeholders to education, increasingly for girls aswell as boys.The evidence base at the international level on secondaryeducation, is far narrower. Sufficient data do not exist todetermine the share of secondary-school-age children whocomplete education at this level globally, or to assess thequality of the education they receive. And as with health,not many developing countries can provide comprehensivedisaggregated data on key quantitative and qualitativeindicators.Child protection is the third field in which the availabilityof data is fundamental to understanding how vulnerableadolescents are to violence, abuse, exploitation, neglect anddiscrimination. It is heartening that since UNICEF and othersbegan to adapt the 1980s concept of ‘children in especiallydifficult circumstances’ into the more holistic conceptof child protection, we now have many more key protectionindicators. Thanks to the USAID-supported Demographicand Health Surveys (DHS) and the UNICEF-supportedMultiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) in particular –but also to national systems – data are available on childlabour, child marriage, birth registration and female genitalmutilation/cutting. More recently, through both expandedhousehold surveys and targeted studies, data have emergedon other child protection concerns such as violence.But the scope for more and better information on child protectionremains vast. Many aspects of this most vulnerable of18THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S CHILDREN 2011