The Uganda Children’s Portal goes live

A national online hub for everything you wish to know on children in Uganda

KAMPALA, 21 June 2017– the Economic Policy Research Centre (ERPC) and UNICEF have today unveiled the Uganda Children’s Portal – a one stop shop on key information and knowledge related to children in Uganda.

The portal, the first of its kind represents a national online ‘one stop shop’ with information on the lives of Ugandan children in regard to their fundamental rights – the rights to health, education and development, protection, and participation. It is a unique online resource to share ideas, and draw on success stories to replicate and/or scale up relevant interventions.

There have been commendable efforts in Uganda on data collection, dissemination and advocacy for the benefit of Uganda’s population, especially its young citizens. It is crucial for stakeholders including government, UN agencies, donor community, research institutions, and universities to also invest resources in strengthening the utilization of knowledge and data for the monitoring of policies and programmes affecting children and to support policy implementation.

The new online hub offers a user-friendly experience and includes various features to help users quickly navigate and find what they are looking for. The website provides visitors with:

• Publications: A collection of child-related data, research materials, policy briefs and reports.

• News: An opportunity to stay up to date on the latest information and events, as well as live feeds to social media sites, including U-Report – a free SMS social monitoring tool for community participation, designed to address issues that people care about.

• E-Newsletter: Sign-up to read and receive Uganda Children’s Digest, a quarterly newsletter outlining progress on the efforts to safeguard the welfare of children in terms of policy, research and ongoing debates.

• Children’s Corner: Access to colouring pages, fun problems, child-friendly documents as well as an opportunity to send in drawings, paintings and stories.

In addition, visitors to the new site can engage with EPRC and UNICEF by sending in questions and comments on any child related issue. The visitors will also actively engage with numerous social media outlets including U-report, Twitter and Facebook to learn more about the situation of children in Uganda and appreciate the role different partners including the government of Uganda are playing to invest more in children.

During the breakfast launch of the Children’s Portal, participants were given a chance to discover the online hub as well as engage in a Q&A discussion.

According to Dr. Ibrahim Kasirye of EPRC, “there is an opportunity for Uganda to benefit from the demographic dividend, however this will only be possible with adequate and targeted focus and investments in children. EPRC is committed to supporting the use of the portal to provide evidence and share information that is critical for child sensitive policies and interventions. We welcome all stakeholders to effectively utilise and engage with this platform”. To echo Dr. Kasirye’s sentiment, Dr. Diego Angemi of UNICEF reaffirmed the importance of establishing systematic approaches to generate and, most importantly, utilize research to inform policy discussions and decisions.

For more information and to view the Portal please visit www.eprcug.org/children