We see evidence that companies care about making children’s lives better. Many companies have programmes in place, donate to charity and adopt policies to safeguard children’s rights, especially around child labour. However, there are challenges to overcome, as evidenced by the following key finding: there is a gap between policies and reporting on the impacts and outcomes of those policies.

While many companies have policies in place to safeguard children’s rights, most are behind in demonstrating their implementation. Among the companies that explicitly prohibit child labor, less than half (43 percent) report any kind of supplier assessment and only 33 percent maintain board oversight over children’s issues.

The improved methodology used this year allows for a more detailed picture of the level of integration within company operations across a range of children’s rights issues, beyond child labour. The results clearly show that companies are better at having policies in
place (though these are still primarily focused on child labour) than they are at demonstrating how such policies are put into practice through implementation and integration into company operations.

On the impact side, companies on the whole are stronger at reporting on the various actions and initiatives they are running to improve children’s lives than they are about being transparent on the outcomes and impact of policies put in place to protect children from harm.