Global investments to optimise the health and wellbeing of children with disabilities: a call to action

On Nov 20, 2022, we celebrate World Children's Day and the theme this year is inclusion, for every child. However, children with disabilities have received little attention from global health and development stakeholders.

Since  the launch of the first comprehensive global health agenda in 2000  under the Millennium Development Goals, the dearth of population data  had hampered global policy, investment, and interventions for children with disabilities.1  For policy makers, no data mean no problem, which translates into no  action. As part of the concerted efforts by stakeholders to address this  gap within the framework of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals  (SDGs) 2015–30, UNICEF, in 2021, published a landmark report on the  state of the world's children with disabilities.2  The report was intended to provide authoritative data on the global  prevalence of disabilities in children aged 17 years or younger and to  draw attention to the living experiences of these invisible children and  their families. Estimates based on data from household surveys of  parent-reported functional difficulties indicate that almost 240 million  (one in ten) children and adolescents have moderate-to-severe  disabilities globally, including 29 million children aged 0–4 years.2 Estimates from the Global Burden of Disease Study suggest that around 50 million (one in 12) children younger than 5 years have mild-to-severe disabilities requiring some form of intervention...