Project: Helping World Vision Make An Investment Case For Protecting Children

World Vision Canada’s mission is to help the world’s most vulnerable girls and boys overcome poverty and experience the fullness of life, with significant programming efforts targeting child protection and participation. World Vision Canada has had challenges communicating the impacts of its work in this area, given a weak understanding of the value of child protection: The costs of not protecting children are believed to be extensive but not well understood.

To address this gap, Limestone Analytics set out to develop a more comprehensive estimation of the cost of not protecting children. This estimation can lay the foundation for future analytical studies to evaluate, design, and prioritize child protection interventions. Limestone first completed a detailed literature review of child protection and the types of harms from which children should be protected: dangers and injuries, physical and emotional maltreatment, sexual and gender-based violence, mental health and psychosocial distress, children associated with armed forces and groups, child labor, and unaccompanied or separated children. Limestone identified the most relevant index to estimate the global costs of not protecting children and then revisited its methodology to update the results from 2014 to 2023. Based on these updated results, Limestone estimates that the global cost of not protecting children stood at $8.9 trillion in 2023 – equal to more than four and a half times the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of Canada.

In addition, Limestone identified gaps in the existing index – types of harm that are not considered – that should be addressed in the future to generate more comprehensive estimates of the global cost of not protecting children.