An operative project of euro-mediterranean cooperation for the conference “Youth in Mena:Expanding Economic Prospects in Urban Areas”.

Together with the map, MedChild Foundation financed a research with the purpose of defining a Mediterranean child wellbeing Index consisting of synthetic indicators of essential aspects of child condition.

This trend of research was presented in a meeting organized at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 25th october 2004. Afterwards the International Seminary on “Measuring instruments for child wellbeing” on march 2006 at CNEL carried the research further. The research aims at the definition of four “MedChild Indexes” which point out different aspects of children and teenagers wellbeing.

The project suggests a fourth more evolved index tending to measure wellbeing in three phases of children and adolelescents development (three different indexes for the phase of the first development, the school age, the adolescence).

The results of research and developed methodology raised the interest of the World Bank in relation to their important initiative about child protection. (Child Protection Initiative) promoted in the cities of the Middle East and South Africa.

Th new indexes will be moved not only towards the “static” comparison of child wellbeing level in different areas, but towards the understanding of the evolutive aspects through time of children condition in the same territory.

Children wellbeing indexes in the cities should be built through  local figures (not only basing on a few available  national figures standardized by international institutions), useful figures which represent the territory situation as much as possible and results obtained in relation to public and private intervention programmes.

In order to build local children wellbeing indexes and to propose their application in Child Protection Initiative, getting the cooperation of some selected European cities or local organizations is opportune. It is convenient to begin with some cities and Italian Regions in order to experiment the realisation of pre-existing Indexes in territories of the South Mediterranean.

Now, children wellbeing indexes are not only instruments designed for developing countries but also for industrialized ones.

The international research aims at analysing poverty and social seclusion aspects. This is a concept that takes the analysis about children wellbeing beyond the problem of absolute poverty income level.

Cooperation with European cities will be carried out in a joint choice of indicators to adopt with MedChild Foundation and making all the information available for the realisation of children wellbeing Indexes.