Reaching Every Child in Myanmar by 2030

In March 2017, the Myanmar Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement’s Department of Social Welfare (MoSWRR–DSW) led the formation of a working group on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for children in collaboration with the Ministry of Planning and Finance’s Central Statistical Organization (MoPF-CSO) and with technical and financial support from the UNICEF Myanmar Country office. Operating under the Government’s Social Statistics Cluster (SSC), part of the national coordination mechanism on statistics, the working group met four times1, over the course of 2017 and early 2018, agreeing a list of 45 priority indicators for children across 9 SDGs. These correspond to 28 official SDG indicators broken down into 36 after the inclusion of some SDG indicators components as a separate indicator, and with the addition of 9 national indicators from plans and strategies for sectors like Health; Education; Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH); Social Protection / Social Welfare. One major focus of the SDGs is to address inequalities and get governments to commit to the reduction of equity gaps over time. This requires dedicated attention and follow-up through the SDG monitoring process. It requires the disaggregation of data by age (including children), sex and other dimensions as well as a recognition of the universality of the SDGs for all groups of the population in Myanmar and for all countries globally.