Road to the Child Summit: How Do We Prioritize Investing in Children?
In November, the Paris Peace Forum will host the Child Summit, bringing greater international attention to a fundamental question: what does it take to invest in the holistic child wellbeing?
Ahead of the Summit, this Sidebar session will bring together implementers, researchers, funders, and decision-makers to help shape that conversation.
Child wellbeing cannot be divided neatly into sectors. Health affects learning. Nutrition shapes physical and cognitive development. Physical safety affects mental health. Psychosocial wellbeing influences whether children can learn, build relationships, and thrive.
Yet the systems designed to support children often divide those needs into separate programs, budgets, institutions, and funding decisions and learnings from successful programming are rarely shared across sectors. Everyone agrees that children should be a priority, but we're not working together enough to turn that statement into reality.
When resources are constrained, that fragmentation creates difficult choices. How should governments and funders prioritize between child and maternal health, early and foundational education, nutrition and food systems, physical protection, and psychosocial wellbeing when all of them matter? Which interventions have the strongest evidence and greatest value-for-money behind them? How should priorities change across different contexts and within countries? And how do we scale what works without losing the characteristics that made an intervention successful in the first place?
These are among the questions the Child Summit will seek to advance. The Paris Peace Forum plans to develop a list of Priority Interventions designed to help move child wellbeing higher on the development agenda of every country, not just in lower-income contexts, and create greater clarity around where investment can have the greatest impact. The Child Summit will also see the launch of an Action Hub for Children, a 3-year multi-stakeholder platform combining the technical expertise of various organizations and companies to advance specific actions for child wellbeing. But developing these interventions requires learning from the people already doing the work.
This session will create space to pressure-test the thinking ahead of Paris: identifying existing evidence that should inform the framework, interventions that are cross-cutting and deserve greater attention, lessons from implementation in different contexts, and blind spots that could otherwise be missed.
It will also tackle a persistent translation problem. Implementers, researchers, funders, and political decision-makers often approach child wellbeing with different evidence, incentives, and language. Bridging those worlds is essential if successful interventions are going to move beyond individual projects and influence larger investment and policy decisions to create one cohesive narrative: that investing in our children is the most effective and most unifying investment we can make.
What to expect
A participatory working session designed to feed learning and perspectives from UNGA to the Child Summit.
Participants will examine what the evidence tells us about interventions across health, education, nutrition, protection, and psychosocial wellbeing, while bringing their own experience of what works, what scales, and what remains difficult.
The conversation will actively look for gaps. What evidence should the Child Summit be paying attention to? Which interventions or organizations should be represented? Where do current investments in child wellbeing fall short? And what would make a global set of priorities genuinely useful to governments, funders, and practitioners working in very different contexts?
The goal is not simply to build momentum for November. It is to make the Child Summit stronger by bringing more perspectives, evidence, and implementation experience into the process before participants arrive in Paris.
Who this is for
This session is for people who should have a voice in shaping the Child Summit: practitioners working across child health, education, nutrition, protection, and psychosocial wellbeing; researchers and evidence experts; governments and multilaterals; philanthropies and other funders; and organizations working to improve outcomes for children anywhere in the world.
What you will get out of it
An opportunity to contribute evidence and experience to the thinking ahead of the Child Summit
A candid conversation about which child wellbeing interventions should be prioritized when resources are limited
Cross-sector learning on what works, what scales, and what needs to adapt across contexts
A chance to identify blind spots, research, interventions, and organizations that should inform the Child Summit
Stronger connections between the technical, implementation, financing, and political communities needed to advance child wellbeing
Hosted by
Paris Peace Forum