On 29th and 30th July, Equilibrium’s chairman. David Bisset, attended a meeting of the steering committee of ChildPact convened at the Romanian government’s Olympic training facility on the banks of Lake Snagov.

ChildPact is a regional coalition for child protection in the wider Black Sea areas and the members are drawn from national coalitions. The countries that are currently represented are Albania, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Moldova and Kosovo.

The participants attended to formal matters relating to the coalition’s mission statement and statute and made preparations for a conference scheduled for September that will bring together the general secretaries / directors of state bodies for child protection.

Additionally, members of the steering committee are testing a prototype of a comprehensive child protection index that will permit the assessment of the stage of development in state systems of child protection tested against relevant paragraphs of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, The end product will –

• promote a region-wide monitoring agenda with a common framework to anchor policy debates,
• verify needs and gaps in protection systems, create cross-national comparisons for advocacy and funding purposes, (what should the EU and governments focus on ?),
• push for new efforts on data population, (we will find large holes in data collection that impedes us from taking further and strategic reform steps – new data can show us the way forward,
• unify various sectors and actors (governmental and non-governmental, academic and international) under shared principles and increased collaboration, and
• ultimately offer incentives and answers for qualitative and quantitative growth in child protection systems.