Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-04-Speech-2-218"
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"en.20010904.9.2-218"2
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". – Reliable figures on the impact of armed conflict on children are hard to come by. Although data is available it is often context-specific, anecdotal or piecemeal. The same consolidated numbers – two million children killed in armed conflict, 300 000 children involved in armed fighting, etc, which were brought to the attention of the international community in the excellent report prepared by Graça Machel back in 1996 are repeatedly invoked without qualification, although they cannot continue to hold true.
I first highlighted the serious lack of reliable data at my meeting with the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Mr Otunnu, in December 2000. Inspired by the discussion with him I took the opportunity of the seminar organised by the Swedish presidency in Norrköping in March this year to call for increased efforts to improve the knowledge about children in conflict. Since that time ECHO has sought to build momentum for the initiation of a large-scale data collection project. The main purpose of the endeavour is to get an impression of the real scale of the problem because the lack of reliable data is both detrimental to our advocacy efforts and a major obstacle to improving our humanitarian response.
But I do not want to initiate just another project resulting in a report which might never be used. Numerous studies have already been conducted on children in conflict. But, as long as there are no common concepts and common definitions, a complex project seeking to establish hard facts has little chance of succeeding. Therefore, rather than focusing on instant results, we are seeking to build broad international support for a comprehensive initiative on a data collection methodology which will enable comparisons across regions and over time.
Last month, ECHO participated in the seminar in Florence – Filling Knowledge Gaps: a Research Agenda on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children – organised by the office of Mr Otunnu, Unicef and others. The workshop succeeded in establishing a network of researchers from both the north and the south, who are ready to undertake research around four themes, one of which will be data on children affected by armed conflict.
In parallel with this initiative, ECHO will continue the cooperation with Unicef. As the UN agency mandated with protecting and assisting children, Unicef has the potential to play a central role in data collection. Therefore the Commission is encouraging Unicef to develop a substantial international data collection project on children in conflict, using Mr Otunnu's research network as a sounding board.
I am ready to make a political as well as a financial commitment to improving the availability of data on children affected by armed conflict as long as any new initiative includes general agreements on definitions, concepts and methodologies for the data collection. The goal is to create a system that enables people working in the field, from all different kinds of organisations, to feed information into a uniform system. This will also have a strong effect on the advocacy work in the countries in conflict because they will know that the numbers, the boys and girls we talk about, the real statistics that emerge from this operation, have been produced on their own home ground and are not something which may or may not be true found in a report."@en1
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