Following today’s release of the Annual Report on the government’s Child and Youth Strategy, UNICEF Aotearoa is deeply concerned that children’s lives are worsening year on year.

The report shows worsened outcomes in the major areas of food security, affordable housing, hospital admissions and immunisation, and no improvement in material hardship since the 2017-2018 baseline reporting year. The percentage of young people aged 15-24 who experienced high or very high rates of psychological distress in the past four weeks has also increased.

The report shows the lives of tamariki Māori, Pasifika children and disabled children are consistently harder than others.

There has been some positive progress in education attendance, rates of child and youth offending and young people’s use of alcohol and cigarettes compared to previous reports.

With Budget 2025 approaching next month, UNICEF Aotearoa is calling for specific investment into policies and programmes that will materially improve children’s lives, so that New Zealand lives up to the Prime Minister’s remarks at Waitangi last year that "by 2040 we will be the best place and society in the world to be a child".

UNICEF Aotearoa Director of Communications Tania Sawicki Mead said in February that so far, the coalition lacked policies that would make meaningful change.

"Trickle down policies simply aren’t going to cut it, when we see that thousands and thousands of children remain in poverty since 2018, and there's no clear evidence of any policy changes which will actually address that long term trend."

That situation remained the same now and was even more relevant given the worrying and deeply disappointing outcomes of the Child and Youth Strategy reporting this year, she said.

UNICEF will release a major report from its Report Card series in May, which will rank countries, including New Zealand, against each other based on a range of wellbeing indicators. It will reflect updated data from the last comparable report, released in 2020, where New Zealand ranked 35th out of 41 countries overall for the same indicators.

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