Standards for child-friendly communities were released at a seminar held on January 13-14, in Chengdu City, Southwest China's Sichuan Province.
The seminar focused on the construction of child-friendly cities and practices of child-friendly communities in offering convenience for children.
Eighty-nine pilot child-friendly communities across the country passed the pre-examination based on the standards, the meeting announced.
A child-friendly community is a safe, healthy community that provides affordable services for children under 18 through an innovative community-governance model with children as the core.
The building principles highlight children first, affordability and reasonableness, children's participation, and co-construction and sharing, according to the standards.
The establishment of the standards will play a role in protecting children's rights to survival, development, participation and protection in communities.
"The standards will be used to evaluate and guide the construction of all child-friendly communities. They will serve as the main basis for assessing whether a community is qualified as child-friendly and provide technical guidance for the construction of such communities," said Zhou Weiyan, initiator and lead author of the standards.
The standards contain nine parts that specify the scope, criteria for quotations and references, terms and definition, building principles, institutional improvement, cultural construction, space construction, service delivery, and personnel management.
"The standards draw on international and domestic advanced experience and will provide a blueprint for the construction of urban child-friendly communities across the country," Zhou explained.
In early 2019, the Chengdu Women's Federation launched the construction of pilot child-friendly community. With continuous effort, 27 communities in Chengdu passed the pre-examination of the first batch of pilot child-friendly communities, the largest number among all cities in China.
Representatives from UNICEF, the National Development and Reform Commission, Renmin University of China, and representatives from major cities joined the seminar. The participants discussed several topics, including how to create an urban environment with child-friendly policies, how to interpret the standards of building a child-friendly community in a scientific way, and how to activate community operations.
(Source: China Women's News/Translated and edited by Women of China)
