Strengthening Monitoring & Evaluation of Children’s Rights and Establishing a Sustainable Stakeholder Consultation Mechanism in Luxembourg

The Commission is supporting the Department of Children’s Rights (Service des Droits de l’Enfant) of the Ministry of Education, Children and Youth of Luxembourg to effectively strengthen children’s rights by ensuring data-driven policy planning, monitoring and evaluation, including through meaningful child and stakeholders’ consultation, and thus address child poverty and social exclusion.

The project is built on two main pillars, corresponding to the two areas of support:

• Improvement of monitoring and evaluation of progress in the implementation of the National Strategy and Action Plan on the Rights of the Child 2022-2026 and of the European Child Guarantee National Action Plan.
• Establishment of a comprehensive and participatory mechanisms to enable stakeholders’ and children’s effective participation in policy development and decision-making processes. 

Context 

Over the last years, Luxembourg has made significant progress in the area of child rights, child poverty and social exclusion and recently adopted two cornerstone policy documents, which reflect the concerted action and commitment to the promotion of children’s rights in Luxembourg and call for a sound monitoring framework and effective participatory processes to ensure their effective implementation, monitoring and evaluation:

• The National Strategy and Action Plan on the Rights of the Child 2022-2026, in response to the recommendation by the Committee on the Rights of the Child and building on the Council of Europe Strategy on the Rights of the Child (2022-2027);
• The European Child Guarantee National Action Plan, following the June 2021 European Union Recommendation establishing a European Child Guarantee, to guarantee every child in need effective access to key services such as free-of-charge access to early childhood education and care, education, healthcare, at least one healthy meal each school day, and access to healthy nutrition and adequate housing. 

Support delivered 

The European Commission is supporting the Department of Children’s Rights (SDE) in cooperation with UNICEF, through the following measures:

• An assessment on the state-of-play of monitoring children’s rights in Luxembourg (including a comprehensive data gap and needs analysis), stakeholder consultation practices and processes and international good practices on monitoring and evaluation frameworks and stakeholder/child participation.

• A proposed set of high-quality indicators and data collection methods and testing of the feasibility of the indicators. 

• A proposal for stakeholder/child participatory policy including participatory governance mechanism and support SDE in implementation, as well as an implementation guide. 

• A roadmap to monitor and evaluate children’s rights and child poverty and social exclusion and for stakeholder/child participation in Luxembourg. 

• A synthesis report with final recommendations followed by a dissemination event.  

Results achieved 

The Project is expected to increase capacity of authorities in Luxembourg to promote and improve children’s rights policies through better child rights monitoring and effective participation of children and other relevant stakeholders. The Luxembourg authorities will: improve monitoring and evaluation methods and tools, based on results of assessment, EU and international good practice, stakeholder consultation and agreed roadmap; consult children and other relevant stakeholders according to a new governance mechanism for stakeholder consultation and ensure results inform policy planning and implementation on children’s rights. The Project will benefit all those concerned with the implementation of children’s rights in Luxembourg: line ministries, local authorities, service providers, academia and civil society organisations concerned with child rights monitoring and child participation.