Responsible Data for Children

Responsible Data for Children

An initiative by UNICEF and The GovLab to provide guidance, tools, and leadership that supports the responsible handling of data for and about children.

Welcome to Responsible Data for Children

Responsible Data for Children is a collaboration between UNICEF and The Governance Laboratory at New York University to promote the well-being and interests of children in our digital age.

We provide a framework for assessing risks and opportunities for advancing children’s rights across the data lifecycle. We are grounded in a set of principles for responsible data handling. Our support and guidance comes in a few different ways.

Our Principles

01

Participatory

02

People-Centric

03

Prevention of Harms across the Data Life Cycle

04

Professionally Accountable

05

Proportional

06

Protective of Children’s Rights

07

Purpose-Driven

What We Do

Offering instructive case studies

Visit our case study page to see examples from around the world on how institutions are promoting responsible data approaches.

Socializing our tools and resources

Check out our tools, a light-weight and user-friendly way for organizations and practitioners to operationalize the RD4C Principles.

Offering partners a platform to promote their work directly

Watch some of the videos developed by us and our partners that speak to the value of the Responsible Data for Children principles and examples around the globe.

Helping children’s advocates to get involved and stay engaged

Want to know more about our work and seek support? Interested in providing your own lessons on responsible data practices for children?

Keep up to date with us by joining our newsletter. We also welcome ideas for publications, case studies, tools, and events so that we can be a hub for researchers and practitioners around the world.

Team

Maintaining a team of dedicated researchers and advocates

Learn about the team supporting the Responsible Data for Children initiative and the different projects they work on.

Andrew Zahuranec

Andrew Zahuranec

Andrew Zahuranec

The GovLab

Andrew J. Zahuranec is Research Fellow at The GovLab, where he is responsible for studying how advances in science and technology can improve governance. In previous positions at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and National Governors Association, he worked on issues as far-ranging as election security, the commercial space industry, and the opioid epidemic. He has a Master of Arts in Security Policy Studies from the George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Intelligence from Mercyhurst University.

Eugenia Olliaro

Eugenia Olliaro

Eugenia Olliaro

ex-UNICEF

Eugenia Olliaro worked as a Programme Specialist at UNICEF headquarters and the global UNICEF lead of the Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) initiative. Through the initiative, Eugenia advocated for a more responsible data handling culture within UNICEF and partners (governments, CSOs, and others), and supported UNICEF offices and programmes to promote the best interest of the child when using data for and about them. Eugenia's law background has brought her to work in different countries with academia, CSOs and a worker's union. She has been working for UNICEF for several years and was posted in Kenya and Tajikistan before moving to headquarters in NY.

Huayizi Chen

Huayizi Chen

Huayizi Chen

UNICEF

Huayizi is a consultant for UNICEF's Data Governance Fit for Children Programme, where she leads youth engagement initiatives and communication strategies. She also conducts research to develop policy recommendations on data governance. Previously, she worked with international media organizations, including The New York Times and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Oxford.

Krisana Messerli

Krisana Messerli

Krisana Messerli

UNICEF

Krisana Messerli is a Programme Officer at UNICEF’s Chief Data Office at Headquarters. She works on the Data Governance fit for Children Programme and in particular its implementation in Administrative Data Systems. Krisana previously worked for the UN Resident Coordinator Office in Burundi where she contributed to the development of the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF), notably the M&E framework and worked closely with UN entities, bilateral development partners and the National Statistical Office on questions pertaining to the modernization of the national statistical system. Prior to that, she spent two years working for UNFPA in Bolivia, working both on Gender-based violence as well as population data.

Sara Marcucci

Sara Marcucci

Sara Marcucci

The GovLab

Sara Marcucci is a Research Fellow at The GovLab, and her work focuses on data governance, tech policy, and digital rights. Before joining The GovLab, she worked at the Open Data Institute in London, where she advised the UK Government and the EU Commission developing policy options to create an enabling environment for bottom-up data institutions. Previous to that, Sara worked as a research and project manager at Nesta Italia, where she oversaw the Tech for Good department, focusing on projects related to democratic innovation, Internet governance, and citizen participation. She holds a MSc in Data & Society from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she then worked as a researcher and investigated the intersections between datafied urbanism and data justice.

Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst

The GovLab

Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Laboratory @NYU (GovLab) where he is responsible for building a research foundation on how to transform governance using advances in science and technology.

He is the Curator and Editor of the Living Library and The Digest.

Verhulst’s latest scholarship centers on how technology can improve people’s lives and the creation of more effective and collaborative forms of governance. Specifically, he is interested in the perils and promise of collaborative technologies and how to harness the unprecedented volume of information to advance the public good.

Before joining NYU full time, Verhulst spent more than a decade as Chief of Research for the Markle Foundation, where he continues to serve as Senior Advisor. At Markle, an operational foundation based in New York, he was responsible for overseeing strategic research on all the priority areas of the Foundation including, for instance: transforming health care using information and technology, re-engineering government to respond to new national security threats, improving people’s lives in developing countries by connecting them to information networks, developing multi-stakeholder networks to tackle global governance challenges, changing education through information technology et al. Many of Markle’s reports have been translated into legislation and executive orders, and have informed the creation of new organizations and businesses.

He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Culture and Communications at New York University, Senior Research Fellow for the Center for Media and Communications Studies at Central European University in Budapest; and an Affiliated Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Global Communications Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communications.

Previously at Oxford University he co-founded and was the Head of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio Legal Studies, and also served as Senior Research Fellow of Wolfson College. He is still an emeritus fellow at Oxford. He also taught several years at the London School of Economics.

Verhulst was the UNESCO Chairholder in Communications Law and Policy for the UK, a former lecturer on Communications Law and Policy issues in Belgium, and Founder and Co-Director of the International Media and Info-Comms Policy and Law Studies at the University of Glasgow School of Law. He has served as a consultant to numerous international and national organizations, including the Council of Europe, the European Commission, UNESCO, World Bank, UNDP, USAID, the UK Department for International Development among others. He has been a grant recipient of the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Markle Foundation.

Verhulst has authored and co-authored several books, including: In Search of the Self: Conceptual Approaches to Internet Self Regulation (Routledge, 2001); Convergence in European Communications Regulation (Blackstone, 1999); EC Media Law and Policy (AWL, 1998); Legal Responses to the Changing Media (OUP, 1998); and Broadcasting Reform in India (OUP, 1998) and The Routledge Handbook of Media Law (2013).

Latest reports and papers include, for instance, Innovations in Global Governance: Toward a Distributed Internet Governance Ecosystem (2014) and The Open Data Era in Health and Social Care (2014), and are also available here. Verhulst blogs also regularly on a variety of topics. For instance: Data Collaboratives: Exchanging Data to Improve People’s Lives (2015), and Reimagining Cities (2014).

Verhulst is also founder and editor of numerous journals including the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy, and the Communications Law in Transition Newsletter.

Get Involved & Stay Engaged

Get Involved

The Responsible Data for Children initiative seeks collaboration with all international organizations, NGOs, private sector companies, and others who have a role to play in promoting the responsible use of data for and about children. We encourage institutions to reach out to us if they are interested in having support for embedding the Responsible Data for Children principles into their work.

If you become a member of our alliance, you will be able to:

  • Find and connect with different collaboration partners;
  • Share your work with stakeholders through our blog site and other platforms;
  • Learn and benefit from others’ experiences and practices;
  • Request services and expertise around specific challenges throughout the data lifecycle;
  • Get the latest news on Responsible Data for Children’s work and events;
  • Receive the opportunity to shape the international agenda around responsible data handling.

Stay Engaged

The Responsible Data for Children initiative maintains a newsletter where it provides quarterly updates on its work around the globe. If you’d like to receive these updates and join the conversation, please subscribe now.