Protecting The World S Children

The book contains four studies that consider the challenges of implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child in different legal traditions or systems: common law, civil law, Islamic law, and plural legal systems. Each study is unique in the way it presents the particularities of the legal tradition under examination and reflects the author's own approach to the subject. The book demonstrates how the CRC can be implemented to achieve children's rights in different country contexts.

On 20 November 2009, the global community celebrates the 20th anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the unique document that sets international standards for the care, treatment and protection of all individuals below age 18. To celebrate this landmark, the United Nations Children's Fund is dedicating a special edition of its flagship report The State of the World's Children to examining the Convention's evolution, progress achieved on child rights, challenges remaining, and actions to be taken to ensure that its promise becomes a reality for all children.

Vaccination programmes now represent a major part of the effort devoted to improving the health of children in developing countries. These donor-funded programmes tend to be global in scope and focus on worldwide goals and targets such as 'polio eradication', and the Millennium Development Goals. Health policy makers at the national level are expected to implement these programmes in a standard manner and report progress according to a few standard indicators. Pressures and incentives to achieve the targets set are then transmitted down to the community level health worker who actually meets the parents and children to implement the programmes. Drawing on first hand, original research in India and Malawi carried out by the contributors, as well as existing literature, Protecting the World's Children: Immunisation policies and practices suggests that there is little or no scope allowed for the effects of variance in the way health systems work, the difficulties and tensions faced by health workers, or differences in the way people think about childhood illnesses that reflect cultural differences. The book argues that the need to show progress can create distortions and lead to the production of misleading data and an unwillingness to report problems. It proposes that vaccines could more effectively serve children's health needs if immunisation programmes are better understood and acknowledged, and if local knowledge and realities were enabled to inform national and international health policy. Written by an international, interdisciplinary team of experts in immunisation policy, Protecting the World's Children is an integrative study of immunisation policy and practice at a global, national and community level, and is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners in international and public health, as well as professionals in international and development studies.

Written by an an international, interdisciplinary team of experts in immunisation policy, Protecting the World's Children is an integrative study of immunisation policy and practice at a global, national and community level.

The State of the World's Children 2011: Adolescence - An Age of Opportunity examines the global state of adolescents; outlines the challenges they face in health, education, protection and participation; and explores the risks and vulnerabilities of this pivotal stage. The report highlights the singular opportunities that adolescence offers, both for adolescents themselves and for the societies they live in. The accumulated evidence demonstrates that investing in adolescents' second decade is our best hope of breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty and inequity and of laying the foundation for a more peaceful, tolerant and equitable world.