Child Rights Impact
Assessment

How can digital products and services providers assess their impact on children’s and young people’s rights? The Digital Futures Commission is exploring the feasibility and benefits of Child Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA) as one means of embedding children’s best interests in a digital world. CRIA was initially introduced as a tool for States to assess the impact of their policies and programmes on children’s rights. Subsequently extended to businesses, CRIA applies established methods of impact assessment to the goal of realising children’s rights as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The report advances the Digital Futures Commission work stream on “Guidance for innovators” which seeks to identify and assert ways to design and innovate with children’s rights in mind to bring about positive change. Early in planning this work stream, it seemed to us possible that, if significant players in the digital world were to conduct CRIA at scale, especially at the outset of the innovation process, this would be a game changer. After completing our desk research on CRIA’s origins, reach and implementation, and evaluating its advantages and disadvantages, it is clear to us that CRIA is a highly valuable but underused tool, and that increasing its take up is one among many changes that are needed.

Encouraged by the adoption in 2021 of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child General Comment No. 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, this report calls on policy makers and providers of digital products and services to use CRIA to anticipate their likely impacts and thereby address issues relating to children’s rights early in the innovation process. In setting out the potential and practicalities of CRIA for the digital environment, our focus is on the UK and its devolved nations, while also learning from European and international developments.