Feature interview: making invisible children countable

Measurement as a child-protection tool

In a new feature interview, members of the Child Visibility Initiative explain why counting invisible children is a protection task as much as a statistical one. The conversation explores how the Index reframes prevention for governments that have long relied on late-stage care data alone.

The team describes everyday pathways into invisibility: incomplete school transfers, health visits that never trigger social follow-up, and families who disengage after a single contact. Visibility scores, they argue, help systems see those patterns before crises escalate.

The interview also addresses common concerns about surveillance, emphasising aggregation thresholds and the Initiative’s focus on strengthening services rather than labelling individual children in public datasets.