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The FACIT Project - Facility for Assessing the Child Impact of Economic Trends and Policies

Facility for Assessing the Child Impact of Economic Trends and Policies
09 Dec 2010
France, Bobigny: Children in primary school
The FACIT Project develops and compiles analytical tools to help advance child rights in UNICEF's upstream social and economic policy work. Through the FACIT website, child rights advocates and UNICEF's staff could gain access to resources for social and economic policy work, including guides, empirical methodologies and applied examples of evidence-based policy analyses.

The main objectives of the project are:
  1. To produce analytical tools that could generate empirical evidence on the links between socioeconomic conditions, public policy and child outcomes;
  2. To use analyses to help fine-tune policy advice and advocacy to reflect upon the impact of economic and other types of shocks as well as different policy reforms on child poverty;
  3. To leverage data and analyses into partnerships and the development of institutions and policies that support national strategies to advance child rights.
The tools featured here are geared towards providing evidence and information for policymakers and child rights advocates during (or in anticipation of) a crisis or policy reform. The broad categories reflect different strands of work as a crisis or policy reform process unfolds, with differing implications on the requisite time, resources, partnerships and technical capacity involved. To the extent possible, all this information is made available for each tool. The tools range from the more complex and data- and skill-intensive tools related to macro-micro modeling, to the more pragmatic efforts to monitor crisis and policy impact through sentinel sites and rapid surveys. Similarly, budget and policy observatories and tracking initiatives are also featured here, altogether providing a wide range of approaches and a menu of tools for social and economic policy work, informing policymakers and the broader public in a timely and evidence-informed manner.

The FACIT website will also serve as a hub for UNICEF and its partners by featuring information on ongoing collaborations, and the intention is to spur new ones to advance the "state of the art" and spread and adapt the most effective tools and initiatives. Inquiries on the different tools and initiatives, as well as possible contributions to this resource base are encouraged and could be addressed to FACIT@unicef.org.