Op-ed: prevention starts with seeing the child

Shared metrics for prevention at scale

A new op-ed argues that child protection systems fail when children remain administratively invisible, and that shared metrics are essential for prevention at scale. The piece situates the Child Visibility Index within wider debates on evidence-informed social policy.

Drawing on partner experience, the author shows how ministries often measure what happens after family separation while lacking comparable signals about children who never reach formal thresholds. Visibility scores, the op-ed contends, make those blind spots harder to ignore in budgeting and service design.

The article closes with a call for governments to treat measurement infrastructure as core child-protection capacity — alongside workforce, services, and legal safeguards.