On the 27th of May, EU and national leaders will gather in Porto to discuss the role of social policies in shaping the European project. With this statement, the EU Alliance for Investing in Children aims to stress that eradicating child poverty is an indispensable stepping stone in constructing a just and equal Social Europe for current and future generations.
By adopting the European Child Guarantee, the EU has demonstrated its political commitment to break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage across generations. To secure its success, the priority now is to turn this commitment into tangible measures to eradicate child poverty. Hence, we call on EU and national leaders to:
- Live up to their political commitment by submitting ambitious and comprehensive national action plans. As living documents that will remain in force at least until 2030, these plans should be regularly reviewed and updated, ensuring a rights-based, integrated, and multidimensional approach and a deep interconnection with the national, regional, and local scenarios they relate to.
- Capitalise on the Child Guarantee to reach and support the most vulnerable, racialised, and disadvantaged children, ensuring that all identified categories of children in need and their families have guaranteed access to the high-quality key services, where and when they need them.
- Ensure that national measures to curb child poverty are adequately funded by EU and national funds and support the European Parliament’s pledge to increase funding for the Child Guarantee as part of the upcoming Multiannual Financial Framework revision.
- Ensure the proper monitoring and evaluation of the Child Guarantee at both EU and national levels by setting clear, multi-sectoral, and comparable metrics, investing in efficient and effective data collection, and defining more specific targets.
- Ensure meaningful, continuous, safe, inclusive, and transparent participation processes with multisectoral stakeholders – such as children, CSOs, support services, parents, and carers – in implementing, assessing, and evaluating the Child Guarantee. Specific outreach practices are needed to ensure children listed as the Child Guarantee target groups and their families are involved.
- Ensure a successful and integrated interplay between the Child Guarantee, national frameworks and strategies, and the EU social and equality agenda, particularly in sight of the 2024 European elections. This includes the European Semester, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan, the need for a more ambitious EU target on child poverty and a rights-based plan to secure a fair and socially just transition.
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