Children flourishing in Belgium
This is the conclusion of a study conducted by an international commission overseen by the WHO, UNICEF and the British medical journal, The Lancet. The study, entitled A Future for the World's Children? aims to pressure the world's different countries into making children central to their actions.
This commission evaluated the flourishing index of children in 180 countries. Belgium appears eighth in the rankings and ahead of countries such as Germany and Sweden.
The commission combined the "surviving" and "thriving" indices in order to evaluate a "flourishing" index for each country. The commission used different elements to do this. For example, the "surviving" index is based on the fields of maternal mortality and infant mortality in children aged younger than 5, suicide, access to maternal and infant health services, basic hygiene and sanitation and lack of extreme poverty.
The "thriving" index was obtained by taking account of educational achievement, growth and nutrition, reproductive freedom and protection from violence in the different countries. Once the results of the indices had been combined, the commission was able to evaluate the "flourishing" index for children. Belgium achieved a score of 0:94, on a scale where 1:0 indicates good and 0 very poor.
Belgium is a country which is particularly mindful of the welfare, development and flourishing of children.