International Day of Families

Good morning.
Can you hear me? Good morning, colleagues.
Good morning.
Welcome to the 2026 International Day of Families.
Thank you for joining here today in person and online.
My name is Masimoo.
I'm from the Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
This year's observance offers a family perspective on the challenge of inequalities.
As you may know, the Doha Political Declaration adopted at the Second World Summit for Social Development, calls for a holistic social development approach, which integrates the role of the family as a central enabler and contributor to social development.
In Doha, member states committed to taking effective measures to address the root causes of poverty and underlying causes of inequality, including through the provision of social protection and family oriented policies such as child benefits, early childhood education, and integrated package of essential services.
Today, we will address how family oriented policies can contribute to the reduction of inequalities, taking into account mega trends and advance family and child well being as we strive for a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable world.
We are excited to share some findings from a new report being launched today on families inequality and child well being in the context of the 2030 agenda.
We are honored to have with us the lead author, Dominic Richardson and his team.
Dominic has been a longtime collaborator of ours when he worked for OECD and UNICEF.
Now he's the Managing Director and co founder of Learning for Well being Institute.
Without further ado, Dominic, you have the floor.
Thank you very much Chair.
It's my pleasure to be here to present the findings on family inequality and child well being in the context of the 2030 agenda.
This work has been put together over the past four months or so.
I think if I was to leave with one main message, It's that despite family being the only social unit that is self reproducing where individuals come from and communities are built from, its visibility in our global social development is poor and could be improved, and that's what we're here to try and show.
The report is basically taking us from a condition of point A where there is inequality and family disparities which are growing internationally, both within and between countries, creating substantial cost the load particularly on the poor, particularly on children, and particularly on women.
We tried to look in our work at what's widening that gap? Where is the gap coming from? Why is it getting bigger? That's why we're looking at mega trends.
Recognizing the family is the point of intergenerational transmission of things that are both good and sometimes bad, we focus on early years policies and family formation to see if they have mitigating effects on this inequality.
Then we talk about applying those policies to get to a point B.
A point B is family policies contributing as they should to social and economic development.
The critical message is we should not wait to support our families and children.
Europe didn't post war, but the discourse now in development is that countries need to afford their welfare.
Well, there is no country I think you could point to that doesn't rely on commodities to get from economy to social development.
There's simply no country that has built its economy first and then moved to tax and transfer.
Those that have moved from economy have done it with diamonds and they've done it with oil.
Every other country has invested in welfare ahead of economic growth.
In this process, families are not well recognized.
If we were to look at, in high income countries, children make up about 20% of the population but receive direct investment in public terms of about 2.6% of GDP.
That to me is an imbalance.
If you're born into a low income country it's less than 1% of GDP.
If you're young and in a low income country in the first six years of life, you can receive between $0.06 hundred.
That's not enough money to deal with intergenerational inequalities.
It's not enough money to deal with the accident of birth.
It's not enough money to promote social development.
When inequalities are inherited between generations, they are accentuated and the gaps widen and social cohesion is at risk, and economic and social development is at risk.
Family policy has the power to address inequality.
My colleagues will take you into a bit more detail of the analysis.
We believe that family policies should be available to every family and to every child.
We're not making the case from solely a social development argument, but also an argument of rights.
Every child has a right to Social Security, but 1.4 billion of the 2.4 billion children worldwide do not receive any.
Every child has a right to health at the best attainable standards, every child has a right to access primary school, and the failure to deliver on early child policies, it means these rights are not being achieved.
If we want to do well for families, we need to start our policies before birth.
We care for the mother and the child in gestation is important and continue those policies throughout the life course, Stacking policies to meet multiple goals and multiple ambitions for children and their rights.
You'll know from the United Nations Convention the rights of the child that we can't pick one right over the others and we can't just do it for some children that The principles of nondiscrimination and the principles of indivisibility means we must do them all for all children.
We need portfolios of policies, policies that not just ensure that poverty is avoided, but health is delivered on and educational opportunities both in centers and in the critical home learning environment, mental health pressures are reduced, so on and so forth.
We really have to do it all.
Otherwise, in our paper would say that we're creating more inequality within and between countries and I fear we'll be back here in ten years or 20 years having the same discussion.
We can't wait.
And the primary problem in low income countries is almost the absence of these policies.
We're talking about statutory public policies, not policies that are delivered by the private sector or non governmental organizations.
Those have particular frailties to them in terms of sustainability and sustainability is an important thing and also in terms of quality and regulation, things that we seriously need to pay attention to.
In high income countries, they don't live in a utopia, they don't have it all right.
In fact, no country has it right and you'll know that no country in the world treats a man and a woman the same and it's public policy.
Which beggars belief.
I don't understand how public dollar can create inequality, but they do everywhere.
In high income countries, the eligibility to certain policies for some children and not for others and some families and not for others weakens the social contract, creates inequality, and countries pay for it.
We all pay for it.
This time, I'd like to talk a little bit about what we want to do post what we really need to do in terms of measuring what matters for families and children, measures of inequality are not good enough.
They're complex, genie ratios, but they don't pick up the fact that a very tiny proportion of people are gathering an awful lot of wealth and the poorest of the poor have not seen a change in their average earnings for 30 years.
But that doesn't show up in a Palmer ratio or genie coefficient because it's not sensitive enough to the extremes of inequality that we're seeing and we need to be cautious of that.
Again, you'll see in the paper that family are very much at the coal face of this.
When inequality increases, and this is data over the past 20 years.
We've looked at every country that has data in the world we've collected for 20 years, we've controlled for economic growth, we've controlled for unemployment, we've controlled for dependency ratios, and inequality drives poverty.
Inequality drives Under five mortality.
Inequality creates delays in family formation.
It weakens the ability of children to learn at the right level.
When the poor receive more of the earnings in the population, things change.
Poverty falls, child mortality falls, children are doing better at school.
So this is basically what we're asking for a stacked and sequence portfolio of family policies.
When a child enters the world, we begin the social contract immediately, we pay for the conditions of that child through public statutory, universal policies, ensuring that health and protection policies are always in place.
That childcare doesn't wait a couple of years before it kicks in.
It's right there when families need it, and I'm In doing so in providing something like this, we can meet those principles of indivisibility, we can meet those principles of non discrimination, and we can reap the benefits of our largest public good, which is the upcoming generation.
This is how countries spend their money.
High income countries are spending 120 times more.
I've got the number than low income countries.
That means inequality between countries will grow as long as our family policies remain the same.
In low income countries, we wait to invest in children.
If any of you work in a business, you would realize how odd that sounds.
You don't wait to invest in your most important things.
You look after them from the beginning and the fact that that's not happening is creating inequality between children and a population.
You'll have heard of Gary Becker in the accident of birth.
We understand the value of a social contract.
It makes no sense.
We are creating scarring and damage for our own populations and our own countries and it needs to change.
High income countries over the life course of spending almost $220,000 per child and for low income countries, it's massively different.
The children who need the most investment receive the least and our policies and the evaluation of our policies are feeding into this inequality.
So we're asking for a policy portfolio.
I'll skip to the main thing.
If I'm successful in what I've been trying to do these past 20 years, by the time I retire, every country in the world will have a universal child benefit.
That important rights of Social Security for every child will be meth and will provide the type of fungible income that helps every family make the most of education systems and health systems and contribute fully to society and flourish.
That's step one, a universal child benefit and any other benefits need to be child inclusive.
Whether it be tax breaks or other.
There's no justifiable reason that paid leave shouldn't be gender equitable.
There's no reason.
Find out what's good for the mother and provide the same for the father.
In that way, when a man and a woman enter the labor market, the public policy has not already decided who is more valuable and it's just scarring, it's just waste, it's cost.
Categorical inequalities are similarly damaging.
We need quality childcare systems, we need family health and nutrition, and we need one stop family centers because case management or liaisons are critical to help some families navigate the complexities of the welfare system.
If we allow them to fend for themselves, more waste, more cost, more rights left behind.
So up until now, the lack of families in our work together and visibility and social development has been a missed opportunity, and we need to change that, recognize families as the core of what we do.
The evidence supports it, the conventions on rights From before I was born and though I'm very young obviously, but before I was born have called for it.
We need to make sure our targets are reasonable and reflect the family needs and what we want to achieve and those rights, and we need to ensure our measurement doesn't take us on the path in the wrong direction because it's not good enough, not sensitive enough to do what we need to do for families.
Let's hope we're the generation of changed.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dominic.
Thank you so much for giving us this really concise summary of the report that has a wealth of information in there and you did an amazing job giving us the top line messages.
We'll continue introducing the findings from the publication with Emilia Tochska, who is an economist at Learning for Well being Institute.
Emilia will focus on the relevance of family oriented policies for achieving child and family well being and addressing inequalities.
Emelia, go ahead.
I think one.
Yeah.
Thank you so much.
So I would like to talk why the answer to inequality is actually family policy.
Let's start with the definition of inequality.
Inequality, it's not just an outcome, it's actually produced in the process and that process is social and it's actually very much formed through family environments.
So our families shape caregiving conditions.
They shape your access to education.
What type of school can you afford as a family? Your access to resources, your incomes are shared in a family, and of course, exposures to any risks.
Family is basically a place where risk is shared.
Little.
Inequality experienced during the childhood strongly influenced the educational outcomes.
There is a research to confirm that, but also labor market participation, health, and future income trajectories.
Family policy should not be treated as a residual welfare spending, it should be actually treated as a structural component of a sustainable development policy.
As such, the family policy, it's redistributive and pre redistributive because it compensates for the disadvantage that before inequality emerges.
The timing matters.
We all know since decades that the first 10,000 days at the beginning of life, it's essential for your health and for your education.
It is characterized by very rapid neurological and socio emotional development.
At this time, children are especially sensitive to poverty, stress in the family, insecure housing, and poor nutrition.
And our welfare systems at the moment simply invest too late.
The report identifies very strongly that even in high income countries, there is a very persistent gap at the age of two when the parental leave ends, but the childcare, it's not really supported.
So there is a strong under investment at the most important point in life cycle.
Okay.
Basically, what we are creating with our current welfare systems in place, it's a vicious cycle.
Because we don't really support early development.
This creates a weaker human capital formation and over time that creates lower lifetime opportunities and recreates inequality.
As such, family policy should not be actually seen as a cost as it is at the moment in many welfare states, but it should be seen as a sustainable form of investment.
We do actually have an answer.
We have all the numbers and all the research to show that universal child benefit is actually the most sustainable form of public spending because it takes care of the first thousand days for kids.
It actually happens at the point of family formation and family formation is the most vulnerable period of life for kids and for adults and it influence caregiving, parental stress, nutrition, and developmental outcomes.
If we do not have universal child benefits, we leave parents to struggle and be vulnerable to income changes at this very important point in time.
Our analysis actually very strongly show that the countries with the universal systems experience stronger gains among poor households, so universal child benefits, lower poverty, and it increases also resilience to a lot of mega trends such as climate change and urbanization and it creates more inclusive growth dynamics.
And why universal child benefit is actually considered as much better than fragmented systems.
If you consider being a low income country, you do have a very huge informal sector and if you have a targeted welfare systems, very often you do not reach the ones who really need help and you create exclusion errors and growth dynamics that are just not inclusive at the very bottom of the income distribution.
So we specifically call for universal child benefit that has an automatic enrollment with the universal coverage for every child.
If the country is not able to afford to roll it out for all the kids under the age of 18, we specifically recommend rolling it out for the age zero to three, which is the first 10,000 days.
This also create support for the parents and it's based on the rights of the child and pretty much it's in support of the United Nations Conventions for the child.
What else we find out in the report is that the family support works the best if it's created as a system and under investment does not.
There are different types of family policy and they should be stacked and they should be sequenced.
You should start with a sequence approach.
You start with a prenatal care to avoid problems at birth.
You follow with the parental leave, so the parents can actually spend quality time with their kids.
After parental leave, what happens? The childcare should be rolled out and we are talking about high quality childcare.
This is the point where a lot of high income countries are not getting it right because affordable childcare does not exist in most of the rich countries at the moment and there is a huge underinvestment At the moment, rich countries are already under investing in early childhood policies and they spent on average 2.6% of the GDP, which is the highest.
If you look at the table in front of you, this shows you a breakdown of spending on kids under the age of six for the countries that are not rich and you can see that the numbers are very little and actually most of the countries reach zero.
The ones that have low income status such as Chad or Djibouti, Botswana, they simply do not spend any money on kids at the age of six.
There is definitely a need to understand that the most important period in human life at the life cycle, the first 10,000 days at the moment completely neglected and there is a scope for the policy to change that.
Those are choices that the governments can change.
Of course, family policy, it's also the most sustainable option to meet SDGs.
Because if you have a universal child benefit, that would lower your poverty.
Therefore, you would meet you will lower extreme child poverty, you will meet SDG number one.
If you roll out if you roll out universal child benefit, your nutrition will most likely improve, so you will be able to meet most of those SDGs and in a way that Just one policy leads to so many positive outcomes that it is the most multidimensional way of meeting SDGs.
It also leads to inclusive growth.
Therefore, the idea of leaving no one behind, it's actually supported here.
One of the very important parts of the report talk about the critique of the fragmented welfare system.
So a If you have a fragmented welfare system, which is the support that starts, then it ends, then it targets specific parts of the society, but doesn't follow, it exists only for a year, but you don't know what's going to happen two years after, how your income is going to be affected.
Those standalone interventions, they usually produce partial outcomes that are very time dependent.
While if you have a system that is sustainable and exists over time, you can actually deal with the inequality and regeneration of it.
And we also have evidence to show that the strongest effects are actually emerging when the policies are integrated, sequenced, so they follow each other and their life cycle aligned.
As we all know from the research, the fragmentations in our welfare state, they just create gaps in the most critical developmental ages.
There is actually a huge opportunity here because low income countries who have no welfare systems in place at the moment, they can avoid the mistakes of high income countries.
They can avoid patchwork welfare system.
With the evidence from this report, they can set a system in place that it's going to be sustainable and it's going to avoid the problems created by targeted welfare system, the cost related to rolling out targeted cash transfers and so on.
As such, if you think about it family policy, it's actually a way of breaking the vicious cycle of inequality through families, and it's because inequality, it's structure and cumulative intervention at the very beginning of life, it's the lowest cost possible.
If we do not follow out with a family policy, that will be cost of inaction in terms of much higher spending in health and education for kids later on.
So delayed investment pretty much increases social and economic costs over time.
As such, we strongly recommend that family policy should be a central part of the post 2030 development strategies.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Emelia, for a deeper dive into the importance of early integrated and sequenced family oriented policies.
We'll now move to Mohammed Obeyi, who's the Associate Director and economist at the Center for New York City Affairs and Senior Economist at Learning for Well being Institute.
Mohammed will focus on the urgency of action for family and child well being in the context of global mega trends.
Mohammed, you have the floor.
Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here with us today.
I will go over some of the findings in the report about the mega trends and how they impact family formation.
Beyond the evidence and the data that we'll be going over, I also just came back from paternity leave, so it's really a privilege and I can see the importance of having that policy in place and how it impacted and still impacts the evolution of my child.
When global change happens, it does reach the family doorsteps.
I Global mega trends, as we call them, are reshaping inequality, family formation, and child well being.
In fact, families are where the macro level pressures become lived realities.
Howard Zinn, famous American historian said you can't be neutral on the moving train and the world is a moving train, whether you're standing or sitting, you are moving with the train.
That's how global change and patterns are happening and families are experiencing it differently, of course.
The policy question becomes, how do we prevent mega trends from becoming drivers of intergenerational inequality? Of course, why the urgency now? Families do remain under supported despite their central role.
As my colleague, Dominic and Amelia mentioned, high income countries spend only 2.6% of GDP on families on average, and you look at the low and middle income countries, they only spend less than 1% of GDP.
The global spending on children under 15, excluding health average is only 0.7% of GDP.
Of course, the youngest children receive only 15% of the average child budget worldwide.
This is an understatement to say that it's not enough.
Now, of course, mega trends are not neutral, so we're not saying that mega trends are bad or are good, it's more nuanced than that, that their effects are just not evenly shared.
Urbanization, digitalization, migration, demographic change, climate shocks affect inequality in different ways.
Some mega trends do reduce inequality on average.
But of course, the problem with average is they hide unequal exposure and unequal benefit.
There is a joke among economists where somebody is asked at the airport, how are you feeling? The person says, My head feels like an oven and my feet feel like an iceberg, but I'm on average, I'm okay.
That's the problem with averages, of course.
Low income countries, unfortunately, and poor families often benefit the least.
Now, why does inequality matter for children and families? Findings show that inequality is associated with worse challenge family outcomes.
Higher Gene inequalities associated with higher poverty at both $3 a day and $8.3 a day threshold, higher inequalities associated with under five mortality, and higher average earnings of the bottom 40% population are associated with lower poverty and lower child mortality.
These associations tend to persist even after one or two years lack.
There is a continuous effect of these trends.
As I mentioned, the mega trends do have uneven effects on inequality.
For example, urbanization is associated with lower inequality and higher earnings for the bottom 40%.
Internet access or digitalization is associated with lower inequality and higher bottom 40% earnings.
This is really reducing the inequality outcomes.
Net migration has a weak inequality increasing effect on average, but it does raise the bottom 40% earnings.
That's important to remember given the current political context, not far from here.
Growth in the population under 18 reduces some inequality measures, but it's associated with lower bottom 40% earnings after two years.
Climate disaster frequency that show limited average effects in the global models.
But impacts may vary by intensity exposure and household resilience and that has to do more with the way we approach our modeling and the data.
But of course, in our findings, we always like to say that absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.
It just means that the way we modeled or approach the data has to be a bit more specified and better.
Now, low income countries do face a different risk profile.
I Their mega trends are not experienced on a level playing field.
In low income countries, the poorest 40% capture fewer of the income gains that are associated with urban, Internet access, and then migration and child population growth is actually one of the few mega trend effects with a positive bottom 40% association in low income countries.
But the child populations do increase pressures on families, care systems, and public budget.
Of course, the risk is widening inequality between countries and within poorer countries.
That's important to stress.
Here are some of the results where the green is the significant inequality reducing estimates, the color coding, whereas the red are those that actually worsen inequality.
For those of us who are in the field or are interested in some of the technical details, I'm happy to have that discussion later on.
But overall, you can see here that Urbanization does reduce inequality at the Palma and bottom 40% is increased.
Internet does have a negative effect also on both the genie and Palma coefficients.
Those are inequality indicators.
Um, um.
One of the issue here we really notice in our approach is that the family policy does change the mega trend story.
So As I mentioned, the non neutrality of mega trend, universal family policies do change and can change how mega trends translate into inequality.
Actually, uniformly across our evidence, universal policies do enhance child outcome or family outcomes and do reduce inequality.
For instance, if I give the example of the universal child benefits, urbanization or is linked to much larger gains in the bottom 40% earnings and without universal child benefits, climate related events are associated with declines in the income of the 40% of the population.
With universal childcare, Internet access does have a strong positive association with bottom 40% earnings and universal maternity policies matter for family formation, but the mega trans mitigation pattern is, of course, less uniform because of the way it's implemented across countries.
Now, overall, the policy universality appears most protective through child benefits on childcare as in our report.
This is another example of how when universal policies are implemented and when they are not implemented, even when countries are experiencing a reduced inequality, for example, when there is no universal policy on the right, you see on the left that universal policies have stronger coefficients, in a way, they act as accelerators.
When universal policies don't act as buffer or in addition to acting as buffer, they also act as accelerators of improving inequality outcomes.
Now, what does policy action look like or what is a family centred policy response? I think it's important to stress as my colleague Dominic and Emilia mentioned, to start early.
It's important to invest from pregnancy through early childhood and deliver child benefits universally.
It's important to support care and work, paid maternity, paternity, and shared leaves, close the age two gap, expand childcare for age two to six, and of course, integrate services, link income support, nutrition, health, childcare, parenting, and child protection.
Of course, this is a call to action beyond the report.
We should not wait.
In fact, we must not wait to support families and children.
This is really a staggering number that every time I look at, I fall from my chair, which is look at the difference between high income European countries.
They invest about $72,000 in purchasing power parity, which means after adjusting for the cost of living per child under age six, many African countries, they invest about $690 in terms of purchasing power parity.
That's a massive difference.
In fact, in 24 countries, spending is even below $500.
Of course, insufficient early childhood investment does cost countries about 3% of GDP on average, not investing in children does have a cost.
Finally, low income countries losses may actually reach nearly 7% of GDP if they do not invest early.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mohammed, for highlighting the impact of mega trends on families and inequalities and the need to use family oriented policies to address them, especially through universal policies.
The publication is now available on our website, so please do take the time to read it.
I am sure you'll find very useful information for the work that you do in various areas and for making the case for addressing inequalities through family oriented policies.
Now we're moving to the good practices part of our event.
We will hear from David Harris, also co author of the report, and he will focus on the evolving global landscape of universal child cash benefits.
David Yabfor.
Thank you.
Gentlemen, our hosts, you and Tessa, I want to just thank you for shining a light on family policy, continuing to be Doha in Doha today.
Really appreciate it.
I'm lucky to be joined here by my daughter.
She's not six months old like yours.
L was a long time but she's 24 now, but I'm glad that she's here as well.
I'm going to focus on universal child benefits, which you heard my three colleagues me as the first policy, the foundational policy for children.
I'm going to slip in two other recommendations we have in the paper just so you have them in your head.
What I'm going to ask you to keep in the back of your mind, I may ask you to keep several things in the back of your mind is somebody named William of Ockham.
He was a 14th century Englishman who came up with what was called Ockham's razor, named after him obviously, that the simplest solution to something is always the correct one or most likely to be the correct one.
It's called razor because you shave away unnecessary assumptions and gets to what's most simple.
Or my wife who's a pediatrician when she was in medical school, they said, if you hear hoof beats, don't assume it's zebras, at least here in the US, depending where you are.
Ockham's razor, I think about this policy is Ockham's policy.
As background, I wanted to say a couple of things.
I want to highlight what my colleagues said earlier.
Dominic showed it briefly in the quadrant with these four graphs of what countries spend on children by age.
What I want to underline, we talked about the difference between high income and low income countries in terms of the total spending.
But the other piece is that young kids get the smallest share of public expenditures as Mohammed just mentioned, which is in direct contradiction to everything we know about child development, whether we're parents, whether it's pediatricians, whether it's economists, you name it.
We know this.
This is a global crisis.
We wait until kids are six across the globe to start spending on children, and then cross our fingers and ask schools to take care of this.
I want to underline how big a problem this is.
According to UNICEF, there are 13,000 deaths from poverty related illness of children under the age of five every single day, 13,000.
Peak COVID, there were 14,000 deaths among all people.
Kids under five are dying in absolute numbers at about the same number as all people are dying during peak COVID when we had death stands illness shutdown and that's ten times the rate.
That's 13,000 out of just kids under five, whereas 14,000 people dying globally.
I will talk about one of the recommendations is moving to parity in spending for the youngest children as we think about new dollars coming in to invest in children.
It's not just investment as a child right, it's also as an investment.
So young children, as you've heard need a suite of policies.
The three big ones are universal child benefits, gender equitable paid leave, and early childhood care and education.
There's a suite of other policies that young kids need as well and obviously home visiting, food packages, family interventions, obviously health needs to be in place and you need to go to prenatal and birth services and postnatal checks and immunizations and all that.
But my focus here is on universal child benefits.
I'm going to say a couple of things about what they are and then about best practices.
What are they? Monthly, unrestricted cash benefits, sometimes more often, occasionally, it's not monthly.
Universal, or sometimes I use the term quasi universal, which means all but the wealthiest.
Universal means all children.
You can begin with the youngest.
You can begin with the youngest.
Korea, for instance, started with infants, and the next year they added one year olds, and then they added two year olds and they're up to age eight now.
Those kids, we need a better term for this, but have been grandfathered in.
Other countries seeing this and when Amelia talked about when they fiscal constraints, I've started with the youngest as well.
This begins to fill in that gap of the underspend and the ignoring of children's rights in the earliest years.
Here's what universal child benefits do.
They cut child poverty.
In the US, we briefly had one in 2021 during COVID and our absolute child poverty rate was cut nearly in half.
The intention of the authors was to make it permanent.
It came up one vote short and child poverty more than doubled.
Food insufficiency, Emilia mentioned hunger.
Food insufficiency dropped by 26% overnight, shot right back up.
Last drop in child poverty on record in this country where we all sit right now, largest increase on record when it expired.
I won't.
Thank you.
They provide the foundation for a comprehensive social protection system for children, the wiring of the system.
They enhance design delivery of other services.
You know where the children are, you know where to build schools.
I was in a capital on another continent recently.
They didn't know by a factor of two how many children they had in the capital city.
They promote broader socioeconomic development.
They can eradicate extreme child poverty.
These are population level impacts.
We're not talking about important interventions that may be happening by NGOs or at the local level.
We're talking about population level impacts.
These are as a right and they can save lives.
We talked about they cut under five mortality in half in Kenya and they're easy to administer.
I'm not a libertarian, but when you send cash out, it's about the easiest thing to do.
There's all sorts of other policies, just because they're difficult, we still need to do them, but it's about the easiest thing to do.
As I said earlier, because they're universal, they can be done at scale.
UNICEF and the ILO, in a paper co written with Learning for Well being Institute, Maybe I mean, you were the first author.
But with UNICEF and I'll now call universal child benefits the foundational policy for child development, the foundational policy.
UNICEF responsible for policies from vaccines from the youngest kids, the oldest kids and everything else are saying not sufficient on its own, kids see a package policy, but the foundational policy.
I'm going to tell you a brief good story here, which is countries are increasingly adopting universal child benefits, sometimes beginning with the youngest, as I mentioned.
Before July, There were 58 countries with universal child benefits or quasi universal, covering 26% of kids globally, so a quarter of countries, a quarter of kids covered.
In July, China announced theirs.
For kids under three, it's annual kids, but it's universal.
It's the largest in the world because India hasn't done it yet.
That's dramatically increased the percentage of young kids covered.
Then most recently Kurzykhstan, which gets us to 60 countries.
Dominic and I share the goal of looking to when we get to all countries and all kids covered by this.
They began nearly 100 years ago, the universal ones begin in France.
They're decades of evidence and they're also thinking of Ockham's razor, the simplest answer.
It's common sense.
Mentioned the US already, so I won't repeat that.
I mentioned China.
Other countries, some of the other recent countries to have them are Argentina, Canada, Korea, Libya, Montenegro, Oman, Qatar, Panama, Panama, Surina.
There's expansions and looking at it everywhere.
The European Commission is considering something called the European family contract, while countries in the EU are the most likely to have universal child benefits, they're not universal in all countries and that European family contract would include a universal child benefit, universal gender equitable paid leave and early child education care.
Mexico City adopted, again, at the city level, not the country level, as part of a program for called from the cradles, the rough Translation.
Kids under the age of three.
A back of the envelope estimate suggests it may eradicate child poverty for the youngest kids, although those kids are in families who also use the money.
Spain has made a commitment more recently also to start with young kids, but that hasn't happened yet.
I want to go back to the multilaterals.
I mentioned UNICEF and ILO.
There's conversations at the G 20.
I'm so happy that we're here with you and Tessa talking about this policy.
There's a forthcoming report from UNESCO called First Things First that will highlight universal child benefits and the importance of them.
UNESCO, of course, focused on education, understanding that if we leave out kids in the earliest years around the globe from spending and cross our fingers, we're not going to get there in terms of achieving child rights.
Best practices, which I think are good practices, which I'm supposed to talk about.
It's important to do these right.
I might say this word over and over and over again, universal.
Most importantly, all but one country have signed on to the Convention on the Rights of the child.
Targeting errors when country's target, fall on the poorest.
And the greatest poverty reduction, of course, and at the population level comes from universal policies.
Monthly payment, at least, some countries do it twice a month.
Starting before birth is really important.
Those are times of acute needs during pregnancy, as well as costs for all sorts of additional items that families need as they prepare for a child.
Some countries consider a larger benefit for the youngest kids before they reach school age, additional benefit for children with disability or chronic disease, sometimes an additional for older dependent as well.
I'm going to mention one related policy before I get to the conclusion, which is because we're talking about mega trends here and the climate crisis, which sounds wonky, but it's really simple to understand per capita rebates, as additional crises hit policies and hit families, Governments struggle with what to do, and one common response is a rebate, a dividend, a payment, stimulus check, an economic impact payment, sometimes called a dividend.
Sometimes they're in proposals for climate plans.
Sometimes it might be as a dividend because your country has some natural resource and wealth.
Some of those designs do not because they're often designed by people who aren't focused on family policy.
Don't take into account the children and the rebates are designed either per household or per adult.
Again, I'll use an example from this country, but I've seen it happen around the globe.
At the beginning of the COVID crisis here in the US, there were something called economic impact payments, EIPs which of these checks.
The first round that went out were $1,200 per adult and $500 per child.
What that meant was that a mom with a kid got less than a childless, a mom with two kids, less than a childless couple.
Just an oversight.
The subsequent two payments which added up to $2,000 included kids as full people.
That was an additional over $70 billion to families with children.
But the important piece there is that kids have to eat too, kids have needs too.
This seems like a small piece, but it's related to universal child benefits because we may increasingly as these crises continue to happen, rely on cash benefits and we need to make sure that kids are treated as full people.
So in conclusion, I want to ask for your help.
This is a global crisis that young kids get the least spending, but people don't know that.
I think many people know about the importance of the earliest years, but I don't think people know that around the globe we're missing out on the earliest years.
That universal child benefits can start to fill this gap, that they're necessary in every country, insufficient, they're necessary, and that countries can afford to do these by starting with the youngest.
There should be debt relief.
Dominic talked earlier about spending ahead of growth.
But countries can do this now and they can start with infants.
I'm a former early childhood teacher and child development specialists refer to young children as concrete operational.
I used to teach three, four and five year olds.
I want to be concrete and operational, young kids get the least.
Universal child benefits are the foundational policy, they're easy to administer, and let's get to work.
Thank you.
Thank you, David, for really doubling down on the need to address the crisis of low public investment in the youngest children globally and how to do it right.
Our last speaker for today is Lorena Villa Vicencio Ayala.
She's the Executive Secretary of the National System for the Comprehensive Protection of Children and adolescents in Mexico.
Lorena could not make it in person, so we have a video from her.
She will talk about good practices and inequality reduction from Mexico.
Cord Las familias son Pripioid Potsiden Claudio, Entro de la Hend Prior de Mexico, conviction territorio poena, integral, politics multidimensional nutrition represents masida Efren major expositional avolen mas profds ultimo sing persistent continuen infrania.
Persistent profundas territorial particular nslravulengrant, context evulen publics solid integrals Mexico tensional infancia, params la la protection, Perre ten historic garantzar participant in the les aff as solo entre organisms international academia Pero require de la to inverters in terps, interarmcras, such Thank you, Lorena, for sharing the experience from Mexico in reducing poverty while continuing to address inequalities and disparities in different parts of the country and communities.
Here, I would also like to thank the large delegation from Mexico attending the observance.
Thank you so much for your continued support.
Once again, thank you all to our panelists.
Let me also recognize representatives from civil society and Academia who are taking part in a Tessa expert group meeting, Professors Bahira Trask, Miha La Rpila, Benjamin Frear and Matthew Mulvaney, as well as Civil Society representatives Alice Vasquez from International Federation of Family Development, Juan António Bars, Instituto Analysis de Polita Famil and Diane Whitehead of Childhood Education International, and Priscilla Danda Ako D Ayuda.
Please feel free to jump into the discussions.
We have time for Q&A and comments now.
Please introduce yourself and your organization and identify the speaker you would like to address your question or comments to.
I have Alex, please go ahead.
Thank you so much.
I had some words prepared for today, but I'm going to start by having a reflection of this bring back memory of when we launched the SDGs and Families Report with nif Dessa when Dominic was here, and he actually came all along and now you're surrounded by a great team.
Congratulations on that on your step on learning for well being.
Thinking of the SDGs and Families report when we were in the room full of member states and everybody, the main question from the parents that I represent in IFFD was, what would that affect me in my household? All the policy recommendations, all the experts here, all the frameworks that we developed here or tried to develop at the UN, how would that land in the ground? Along the years while we were trying to feed that SDGs and families report, we've tried to land it in three examples that I brought today.
In the Philippines, we expanded from not only just a few parents, but the whole region.
All the islands are now trying to implement the parenting models for parents.
I'm definitely going to tap into all the learning for well being recommendations on how to make all these changes for the future.
In Kenya, we just came back together with DISD Renata, in this workshop not only to put the national family policy into action, but how is going to be that actionable items among academia, IFD, Kenya, and IFFD global here together with UNSA.
The third example is part of this network of cities that we have that represents 250 million people and definitely thousands of families.
That we are present in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, where we have trickled down not only from national capacities to local and regional capacities.
In Colombia, they're trying to get all these mental health prevention strategies to parents to deal with anxiety that is either as David mentioned before, the formation of a family, what brings that all the way to the end.
We're ready.
One form of inequality that we see is that we can have a lot of policy design but not much impact on real families.
That's what they are asking, especially in IFFD in the 68 countries that we are present and in the 50 years that we have had on the ground.
Hey, what are you doing at the UN for us? Let me bring back some words that Dominic mentioned in that launch of the SEGs and families What the world's families need now is definitely the political will to act at every level.
The best way to empower families is by allowing them to do what they need to do.
Thank you for that.
Would anyone like to comment, Dominic.
Go ahead.
Thank you, Alex.
That was some six years ago, I think, when we launched.
I want to compliment the work of IFFD and your network.
You brought to the table the thing that has stuck with me every time I've spoken since we worked together on that report is the absence of family in our social development goals.
Which I mean, there's a lot to surprise us.
We've written a lot and shown numbers that are very surprising, but just that the family is not visible in our social development goals means we can't utilize all of the strengths of the families, we can't build systems that really empower families.
I just want to pick up on something that the executive secretary, Madame Vincenzo mentioned.
She said, investing in children is investing in peace.
I like to tell people since I learned it recently.
I'm always trying to learn more, that the word welfare is an antonym of warfare, that it was stated by the Archbishop of York in 1945 after the end of the Second World War, when he said, we've had enough of warfare, it's time for welfare.
Welfare somehow become a dirty word, but it's not a dirty word.
It's the thing that invests in peace and community and connection between people, which is at the heart of our well being.
Not just individual, you get the greatest joy from connecting with people and feeling connected with oneself, but connecting with the world around you.
Is critical too.
We can't do that if some of us are only half here because of the lack of investment in their lives or the opportunities.
Going back to that point on allowing families to be families, properly to be families, to find the time to love and care for one another and engage in society fully is absolutely critical if we really want to live in a world of well being and a world of peace.
It is not possible to continue to divide families and to put pressures, particularly on the poor and particularly on women and hope that somehow the economy will pull us through.
We've had 70 years of this at the UN and more.
Inequality isn't getting better.
Investment in family isn't getting better, well being isn't getting better.
We have the highest rates of mental health concerns as ever measured and we still struggle with this absolutely abhorrent death rate of children.
No, we need to create the environments in which families can really be families.
Just one friend of mine said, why do we insist on treating a fish that's sick in a pond that's dirty in a forest that's polluted and hoping that somehow the fish will stay well? You need to create the environments.
You need to clean the pond, you need to clean the forest, and then your work with the fish will be sustained.
We're treating and treating the symptoms of poor environments and weak family policies.
It's time we just woke up to the reality of the issue and stop trying to save money on the most critical thing for us all.
Thank you, Alex.
Go ahead, David.
Mentions the welfare to warfare to welfare.
We're now in a different moment.
Of welfare to warfare in terms of investments around the world, spending around the world.
What's so important about this body and the importance of UNDS centering family policy is an opportunity to make a claim to move towards welfare in using the evidence to put forth calling on countries to put in the best set of policies that we know from decades and decades of evidence have the strongest impact on families and children and meet their rights.
Thank you.
Thank you both.
I have Generations United.
Thank you.
Donna Butts from Generations United and it's wonderful to be here.
Thank you very much to the experts, for the report, to Dessa for the annual observance and the contributions that people have made.
I wanted to ask when we speak about inequality, one of the things that we know here in the US is that when it comes to non traditional families, grandparents and other relatives raising children, that they're twice as likely to live in poverty as families that may be considered more traditional.
I'm wondering, given that inequality and the impact of poverty and intergenerational poverty, if the authors of the report had an opportunity to look at, are there differences across family structure and are we taking into consideration policy when we think about comprehensive policy, are we thinking about family policy, child policy, aging policy, and how those all influence and support families.
Thank you.
In this report, we haven't done breakdowns by family type, but there's 30 years of evidence on the poverty risk to more acute in split generation families in single parent households, where there is a greater burden of care, even for want of a better term, a traditional family model, when the ability to earn is crowded out by care needs, because you're on your own, because the baby you have a baby or a young child that needs more care.
Um, that clearly plays through into lower income, lower earned income, lower disposable income and poverty risks.
We need to be aware of them.
I think another thing that Madame Villa vino mentioned was the universal benefits alone is not enough and David said the same.
In Europe, I wrote a study for the European Commission which was published almost ten years ago.
And we looked at comprehensive portfolios.
Now, the countries with more universal systems had significantly lower rates of poverty at average spending, and they had significantly faster declines at marginal increases of spending and the switch for many of these countries, the key policy was an additional element in the family allowance for single parent households.
Because single parent households have weaker earnings potential and our rights for the child remain the same.
We refer to non discrimination, regardless of the family's background, the child deserves their rights.
And that's one way of doing that to ensure that we focus on getting things through to the kids.
Yeah we touch on in the paper, the social contract concept because we think it might be a powerful thing for people who want to advocate in this room.
I had another story of mine, sorry for those who heard it yesterday.
I was lucky enough to meet the Luxeburg Prime Minister.
Now in Luxembourg, they spend more on children than anywhere else in the world.
But if you're born into a family where the mother has no formal employment or hasn't worked formally for the past year, the family didn't receive a maternity benefit.
And the richness of the average Luxembourg is child wasn't the reality of a child born into a poor family or a family with weak labor market attachment.
I did ask the question, why would you not pay maternity benefits to everybody? His response was, and I hope he's not watching, that the mother was not working anyway.
My response shock, it was shocking.
My response is, but it's not just the mother.
There is a child and what is your experience of raising a child in a poor household? Did the child choose to be born in Luxembourg and where is the social contract for that child? Why do we hide that child behind the actions of the parents over the years? The family is a place for care, but the child is an individual in society.
If we want the child to be a contributor across the life course, we can't say, this child gets something because of mom and dad did this and that child gets something because mom and dad did that.
We're actively creating inequality, which is hugely problematic.
We go back to the comments of the executive secretary and realize that the foundational policy is universal, but the elements you need to add afterwards are in recognition of need and topping up for families who struggle to make ends meet for their children.
Thank you.
Hello.
In Bambal Ha, Director of the Institute of Family Policy in Mexico.
For us, these meetings are great importance as the reports present will help us understand the situation and formulate proposals for the implementation of the local level.
Participating in this gathering are two mayors from Mexico.
Daniel Carrillo of San Nicola de los Garza and Rio Rivera of Colima as well as two legislators, Lao Alvarez and Ein de Cams from Mexico and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, who are implementing laws and public policies with a family perspective to reduce inequalities and promote child well being.
I would like to extend my recognition to Renata Kaczmarska, the focal point on the family in the United Nations to promote these learning platforms, which enable us to understand, share, and promote family policies with a global vision and local implementation.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Juan.
LDS charities, please.
Good morning, and thank you very much for the invitation to be here today.
Congratulations as well to Tessa and Renata and happy International Day of Families.
I really appreciated all of the findings that were presented today, not the least of which is because Latter Day St.
Charities has made a shift in the last couple of years to specifically promoting and helping out for the conception basically to year five in the areas of welfare and health and everything else in education, et cetera.
It makes me happy that we're on the right track.
You named a lot of different countries and whether they invest early in childhood and whether they don't invest in childhood, et cetera.
But I'm curious if you have any case studies of families who in the last 20 years have shifted their priorities to either invest or divest away from children and specifically investing in children, like has there been any countries that have made a conscious effort, said, Yes, this is something important we need to do? What have been some of the pitfalls on the way to trying to do that? What are some of the snags, and what are some of the success stories if there are any? Well maybe I have a go getting bored of listening too.
But thank you.
That's a really excellent question.
We get this question a a lot.
The countries we've pointed to recently in terms of expansion, an example is Korea, the dream start system in Korea that was rolled out approximately to 2012.
Korea went from a country that was investing very little in preschool on children from conception through to the start of compulsory school.
As David mentioned earlier, they started to roll out this universal child benefit and they started a very comprehensive Dream Start system, which is similar, you'll have heard of Head Start.
That has had cross party consensus and has continued to grow, changing the profile of Korea quite dramatically over the past 15 years.
I've been fortunate enough to be in conversations with UNICEF in China and I got over to China in advance of the recent policy change and we think that the universal child benefit in China, this introduction of the payments for children aged zero to three is a huge signal of an understanding of the commitment to children in that period of the life course and the importance that has for strengthening all elements of the Chinese care economy and the system across that country.
I'd like to say if the system in China and other People will probably know more than me about this.
It's very complex with multi layered governance.
If it's possible in China, it's possible anywhere to implement that policy.
I and we continue to push other countries.
Last year, we wrote a study where we took a number of countries, we looked at their profiles and we imagined what it would look like if they delivered something that was like the stacked and sequencing model.
We filled in the gaps and we counted up the dollars and we estimated a return on those dollars in a study called every child, every family that's been published in support of their world and the Act Together for early Yes Coalition.
Um, and we showed that it very quickly in the first year, the returns on formalization of female labor market participation would be large particularly in South Africa.
Now South Africa has an interest in formalizing more of the female labor market participation and the response from Cyril Raposo was to invest 10 billion Rams into childcare infrastructure in response to this evidence.
I don't know where we are in that process now, but that's about $600 million going now to children in South Africa.
A I started at the OECD.
We did this type of work 20 years ago and I've watched OED countries almost in every case expand their investment on children under the age of six from about 15% to 20% up now to almost 30% of the total expenditure on children, which is so close to parity, so close to that 33% magic number.
I'm from the UK.
The UK is the only country in the past 20 years that has reduced per capita spending on every element of child policy in the past 15 years.
Every other country has increased in at least two of the four areas that we look at.
It's moving and it's moving on the base of the evidence.
Just two quick things I would add.
I One is when Dominic says preschool, he said preschool years, I just want to be clear, preschool years is this set of policies.
I know all of us have said this over and over again.
We're not just talking about early child education care, which is essential but not the only policy.
Then the other example is the US, of course, which saw this dramatic increase for the first time in history in record, child poverty among the youngest kids in the US was no higher than child poverty among older kids.
It was lowered for all kids, but it was lowered more for younger kids because there was an additional increment for young kids, which is often recommended as we talked about in best practices.
Then of course, it expired.
Something that's quite important.
I also worked with UNICEF and managed the evaluation of the cash transfer project, which has been ongoing for 15 years with UNC here in the US.
That project has been experimenting, looking at what cash transfers do for families, mainly in Eastern Africa, though there's some work in West Africa and Ghana.
We're working with Ghana on their profiles right now.
And One lesson I took from this is that we really ought not to be experimenting on families in low income countries.
It stands to reason that if a family is given money, they'll do something with it that means something to them.
And I believe this experimentation has sent the wrong signal to governments that if we can't prove that cash loads on outcome, an economic outcome, then it's not worth doing.
If you look at Africa over the past 20 years, you've seen movements in statutory family policies on social protection unless you look at East Africa, where the experimentation continues and the delay in statutory policy development it goes hand in hand as we wait to find out whether it matters.
I think we really need to take a close look at ourselves in terms of the evidence building and the economic return or the concept of developmental welfarism.
If you haven't heard of it, look it up.
It's quite fascinating it flips the conversation where welfare can only be justified on economic returns, when actually economic returns are not the primary goal of society.
The primary goal of society is social cohesion and wellness and inclusion.
By introducing all of this evidence and caring for a small change in an effect size on this, that and the other, we're delaying critical investment for families which frankly, in some cases, I don't really care about the evaluations now.
I just know it would be an improvement.
We've talked about the numbers.
Every 10 minutes, 65 children die because of poverty related causes.
Right now, we've got past 400 children just whilst we're sitting here.
So words and all just get it done, get the policies out there.
I just want to underline that Europe post war, invested as Dominic said, ahead of growth, didn't wait for RCTs and say, if families had a little more cash, might their kids have a little more food in their bellies and able to learn and go to school.
And then we've set up these RCTs on the populations that can least afford it.
What are we going to do? Wait five, ten, 15 years, see if people live to 50 to 60 to 70 or more.
It's nonsensical and it's against children's rights.
I just want to underline that the RCTs put children at great risk.
Thank you, Priscilla.
Thank you.
Stations.
And Donata, thank you for this incredible opportunity to share our territorial experience.
I'm Priscilla Dana.
I'm the Director of lo deuda.
Our organization has worked in highly poor rural and indigenous communities around all the country in Mexico and we support families during the most critical stage of life, early childhood.
Today, we know that timing matters and the earliest years are the most important and critical for the rest of the life.
It's a short window for investment.
But we also recognize that these investments must be integrated.
However, family policies often prioritize nutrition, vaccination, and access to education, which are really important and essential needs.
But evidence highly increase that the quality of caregiving and caregiving mental health, family well being and socioemotional development are not secondary or complementary dimensions.
They are foundational conditions for health, child development, and for the effectiveness of all other interventions.
In this sense and drawing from the territorial experience of Fkoula, I would like to say that governments should therefore must recognize socio emotional development, nurturing and caregiver well being as priority pillars of family policy and public investment.
These dimensions from the earliest years are essential not only for children's emotional well being, but also for cognitive development, learning, health outcomes, and long term social inclusion.
Thank you.
Thank you, Priscilla.
Maybe we have time for one more question, go to Benjamin, please.
Thank you so much.
I'm Ben Freer, I'm the dean of the Marion Turpin College of Psychology and Counseling at Fairley Dickinson University.
Really thrilled to have today 15 graduates from our program in China from Golden Education, so thrilled to have them with us as well.
What I was really interested in is I am as big a supporter as you can find on universal child benefits.
But we have a room of people and people around the world watching who want to be the messengers.
But when we bring up universal, we're often hit with these pushbacks from community members saying, why are we giving money, support to people who don't need it? I'd ask each of you as the speakers to help us communicate the message of why universal is so essential and how we can really impact the families and communities around our world.
They've finally given up on me.
They've come.
It's a great question, Ben.
Thank you, and it's something we hear a lot.
We could take it from different angles.
First, I think we misunderstand the dynamics of the family.
We imagine that poverty and the need for intervention or need for a policy or support is constant, you're always poor and you're always going to be rich.
Well, actually for a lot of people, that actually does happen.
Very sticky intergenerational transmission of income, particularly in countries like the United States, Italy, the UK.
But if you're born poor, you're likely to die poor, 50% born rich, you're likely to die rich, whatever you do, likely to die rich.
But the rest, people are churning and moving around.
And that turn and movement around creates insecurity.
Insecurity to employment and housing, mental health, you name it.
When people need something like family support, they need it at a time where the vulnerability is going to be high.
If that's already there, if it's already in place and it doesn't change.
Then you're not going to worry about taking a new job or working extra hours or if you're hit by a climate related event.
Our evidence shows very clearly the mitigating model is a universal model.
The cost in real terms is almost indistinguishable.
The evidence suggests that average spending, you get more poverty reduction at the population level from your universal model.
Indeed, when an economic crisis, let's go back to 2008.
Countries like the UK and Ireland saw their family spending hit above 4% because the targeted benefits are automatic stabilizers, all of a sudden became very expensive.
This is where for me the main thing is, is then it became politicized.
Caring for children became a political football because you can spend on some and that gets you some votes either one way or the other, or you can blame some for being poor and that gets you votes one way or the other.
But if you treat family support as a universal right nobody can make a political hay with that right and the instability that then comes from this moving the system around back and forth and creating very expensive and complex administrative structures is gone.
Is gone and incidentally, we're treating every child as if they didn't choose to be here and they didn't.
It's a commitment from state to the child.
B, I don't mean government.
We don't say governments are generous in our work because they don't spend their own money.
I can't be generous with your money then by state, I mean the public's commitment to the public's children.
Thank you.
Good.
Thank you, Benjamin.
Actually, in full transparency, the question is very interesting.
Two days ago I was sitting with Dominic and I told him, let's do a thought experiment.
Suppose you're sitting with the finance minister right now and he comes to you or she comes to you and say, Listen, I have scarce resources and should I implement targeted policies or universal policies? Obviously, the poorer category of population would say, Well, why would we give money to those who already have? I guess he gave you the beginning of an answer.
What I would say though is the answer has two components.
The first one is normative or maybe ethical consideration, which is the receiving benefits first is for children.
It's a right.
Regardless of your income situation, regardless of what you inherit from your parents, we think that it's a fundamental right, that it's inalienable and regardless, again, France, for example, has this policy when it comes to that.
And therefore, we should look at it from that perspective to begin with.
Now the second one, which is more of a positive response or consideration, not normative, is in terms of cost and efficiency.
It is true that in the short term, you might believe or you might see that yes, it might be more costly to implement universal child policies than targeted.
However, in the medium and long term return, or term, the returns are higher when you have universal child benefits because after all, you can't have distribution if you don't have a good economic growth, whether it's through taxation or any other redistributive policies.
As a result, you do have stronger economic growth, you do have stronger economic system with universal child policies.
Even if in the short run you do implement targeted policies, the returns are actually very short sighted.
That would be my answer to the question if I was sitting next to the finance minister.
But again, political cycles are not the same as what we do.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for that question.
My answer it's different to my colleagues who are very rights based and I really appreciate it.
But personally, what gets to me the most about that policy it's how smart it is because it's simply sustainable.
It creates, it changes the vicious cycle of what we have at the moment into a virtuous cycle.
The timing, there is the family formation, It's the intersection of so many things happening at the same time, caregiving, your income goes lower because now you have additional cost.
If you intervene at this one specific moment at the family formation with extra money, you create a virtuous cycle, your nutrition outcomes are better, your child poverty lowers and you create the economic system that actually generates in terms of human capital.
At the moment, what we do, we use welfare as completely not sustainable.
We actually think of welfare as not sustainable, which is absolutely wrong.
Universal child policy, it's the most sustainable because it's the investment at the timing when it matters the most and creates the virtuous cycle and better economy for all of us because we invest in kids.
Okay.
One specific example, Dominic mentioned the Great Recession 2008, 2009, Canada, which has a child benefit, delivered on the 18th of every month, starting the month after the child's born until they turn 18, a third larger than what the US had in 2021, by the way.
They plussed it up in the Great Recession immediately because the piping was there.
They had the child benefits, they will do it.
In the US, it took months.
It took months.
Subsequently, in 2021, economic impact payments, which I mentioned earlier, the expanded child credit, which was monthly for one year, six months, but additional part for the rest of the year.
They took months to set up, still quickly, still really well done, but a delay for families at the most vulnerable time and the families who weren't signed up were the ones who weren't in the tax system, the most vulnerable.
The attempt to be save money, if you will, penny wise pound foolish, the burden gets put on the poorest, those least connected to services, and disproportionately that includes the youngest kids.
Mm hm.
Thank you.
Well, we've had a very full discussion and we are over time, but I think this gave us a very clear picture of how inequalities are results of policy choices and that family oriented policies are key to reducing inequality in its many forms.
We heard loud and clear that invest in families and invest early and stacked and sequenced interventions yield stronger and more consistent outcomes.
So with that, I have one announcement before we close.
The permanent missions of Austria and Mongolia are hosting a family picnic on Sunday from 10:30 A.M.
To 1:00 P.M.
On Cedar Hill in Central Park in honor of the International Day.
Happy International Day of Families, everyone, and thank you for your attendance and participation.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.