CSC Work

Royal Statistical Society volunteer helps CSC assess numbers of street children

Published 09/17/2019 By CSC Staff

RSS Statisticians for Society volunteer Sarah Barry has recently completed a project to help the Consortium for Street Children (CSC) find the best methodology to estimate the numbers of street children around the world.

One of the challenges facing policy makers and those working with street-connected children is that no one knows how many of these children there are in the world, or in any given country. The counts and estimates that do exist are incomparable due to the differing methodologies and definitions used in data collection.

CSC asked the RSS for support to help us and our partners to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of these methods.

The report produced by Sarah concisely reviews four existing methods for counting and sampling street-connected children, and has already contributed to our ongoing work with UNICEF and other organisations, which aims to identify one method to be used consistently across different countries. Sarah is continuing to provide support by looking into the development of a statistical model to be used to estimate numbers of street-connected children where counts are unavailable.’

Founded in 1834, Royal Statistical Society is one of the world’s leading organisations to promote the importance of statistics and data. Find out more about RSS here.