Every Child Safe, Loved, and Nurtured:
Global Caregiver Forum Outcome Document
Madrid, Spain, 15–16 January 2025
We, participants of Global Caregiver Forum, Madrid, Spain, 15–16 January 2025, underline the centrality of evidence-based parenting support (EBPS) to ensuring all children benefit from safe, sustainable, and nurturing relationships with their caregivers. Strong child-caregiver attachment is the cornerstone of healthy development, lifelong wellbeing, and productivity. Often unintentionally transmitted across generations, harsh, inconsistent, or unresponsive care is a day-to-day experience of more than half of the world's children. This maximises risk for mental and physical illness, poor educational outcomes, crime, violence, and substance abuse disorders throughout the life course. We can help prevent this risk by urgently investing in EBPS. We recognize that the lifelong costs childhood adversity places a catastrophic burden on the global economy, adding urgency to our call for parenting and caregiving support as and a global public good.
We recognise the evidence showing EBPS significantly enhances the following outcomes:
- Child cognitive, social-emotional, and motor development.
- Responsive caregiving, reducing harsh parenting and maltreatment.
- Child and parental emotional and mental health.
- Reduced family and intimate partner violence, specially gender-based violence.
These interventions are a proven accelerator for achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 3 (health and wellbeing), SDG 4 (quality education), SDG 5 (gender equality), and SDG 16 (peace, justice, and strong institutions). With a return on investment of up to $13 for every $1 spent¹, EBPS are among the most cost-effective public investments. As 1.3 billion children will be born in the next decade, we are the first generation with the opportunity to ensure every child grows up safe, loved, and nurtured.
We commit to global collaboration to scale up EBPS, fulfilling the SDG promise to promote child health, quality early childhood development, and end child abuse and exploitation. We call for urgent, coordinated action across governments, international organizations, scientific community, civil society, and the private sector to make universal access to EBPS a reality, there by contributing to a world in which every child grows up safe, loved, and nurtured.
Call to Action
We urge all stakeholders to prioritize the following actions:
1. Develop Global Support to Governments
With support from relevant UN agencies (e.g. UNICEF, UNODC, WHO), establish a robust framework to support governments in designing, implementing, and evaluating evidence-based parenting interventions. This includes:
- A conceptual framework for EBPS design and delivery.
- A comprehensive cost and benefit analysis highlighting costs and benefits.
- Evidence based parenting support guidelines.
- Benchmarking tools to analyse and measure progress in policy development.
- Quality assurance standards
- A standardized data instrument for national statistics offices to measure outcomes.
Building on the existing Human Rights Resolution on Care and Support, we propose maintaining the Global Caregiver Forum as a quinquennial event and advocate for a UN General Assembly resolution and summit on parent and caregiver support to solidify global commitment.
2. Support National Scale-Up
Governments are urged to develop or strengthen national parenting and caregiving strategies, policies, and services to promote healthy childhood development and parent and caregiver well-being. Parent and caregiver support:
- Can be embedded in health, education, justice, social protection, while pursuing integration across systems or with civil society or private sector.
- Should be grounded in evidence but tailored to local cultural contexts and community strengths to maximise engagement and cost-effectiveness.
- Should adopt a universal and progressive approach, providing baseline support to all parents, with additional resources for those most at risk, and whenever specific support is needed.
3. Finance Evidence-Based Parenting Support adequately
To achieve universal access to parenting and caregiving support, we call for:
- Increased Public Investment: Governments should prioritize budget allocations for parenting interventions, integrating them into national health, education, and social welfare systems as a core component of child development strategies.
- Mobilizing Private and Philanthropic Resources: Engage private sector partners, foundations, and impact investors to co-fund scalable interventions, leveraging public-private partnerships to bridge funding gaps.
- Global Financing Support: Reinforce dedicated multilateral funding streams and synergies to support low- and middle-income countries in scaling cost-effective interventions.
- Widespread Advocacy for the Investment Case: Launch a global campaign to disseminate information about the compelling evidence for economic and social returns of parenting interventions, targeting policymakers, donors, and communities to secure sustained funding commitments.
- Innovative Financing Models: Explore results-based financing, social impact bonds, and micro-financing to ensure sustainable and equitable intervention delivery, particularly in resource-constrained settings.
These actions will ensure sustainable financing to reach every family, prioritizing those most in need and those in humanitarian contexts, and maximizing long-term societal benefits.
4. Track Progress with Transparency, Accountability, and Inclusiveness
To achieve universal access to EBPS, governments require timely, high-quality data on coverage, quality, and outcomes. We propose:
- Developing a global dashboard to monitor intervention coverage and parenting outcomes.
- Publishing periodical global and national progress reports to ensure transparency and accountability.
5. Strengthen Partnerships, Breakthrough and Knowledge Exchange
Better child development, protection outcomes require collaborative, inter-sectoral action. Governments should:
- Engage all relevant ministries, agencies to prioritize caregiver-child outcomes.
- Mobilize local coalitions from public, private sectors, and civil society, to concentrate on parenting and caregiving support.
- Map parenting programmes in their territories and align efforts among government donor agencies, UN, health agencies, NGOs, companies, foundations for implementation of a coordinated strategic plan for scale-up., with the support of the specialised scientific community
- Invest in behavioural and implementation science, innovations to improve intervention scalability, quality.
- Facilitate knowledge exchange, build on the previous WHO-led regional consultations, platforms to share best practices.
Our Commitment
We, undersigned, pledge to collaborate with urgency for a world where every child grows safe, loved, nurtured. By scaling caregiver interventions and care structures, we can transform childhoods, strengthen societies, and achieve lasting impact on global development. Let us seize this opportunity to build a world where every child thrives.
Signed by participants of Global Caregiver Forum, Madrid, 15–16 January 2025
¹ Gertler, Paul; Heckman, James; Pinto, Rodrigo; Chang-Lopez, Susan M; Grantham-McGregor, Sally; Vermeersch, Christel; Walker, Susan; Wright, Amika S Effect of the Jamaica Early Childhood Stimulation Intervention on Labor Market Outcomes at age 22
