As negotiations on the next EU long-term budget (2028–2034 MFF) intensify, key decisions will determine whether the EU strengthens or weakens its commitment to tackling child poverty. Decisions taken in the coming months will shape EU investment in children for the next 7-year framework.

What the Taskforce will do

• Provide regular policy updates on MFF negotiations
• Share advocacy tools, messaging, and country-specific guidance
• Jointly develop practical guidelines and templates to support members’ national-level advocacy (e.g. engagement with Managing Authorities, input to national plans, and use of EU funding instruments)
• Support engagement with national Ministries, Managing Authorities, and EU institutions
• Facilitate peer exchange and coordination among members
• Strengthen links between EU-level advocacy and national implementation

Duration and structure of the taskforce

• Duration: 2 years (2026–2027), aligned with key phases of MFF negotiations
• Meetings: 3–4 online meetings per year
• Additional engagement: Ad-hoc meetings and coordination moments as needed, depending on negotiation developments

Who should join

• Organisations (advocacy) working on children’s rights, child poverty, or social inclusion
• Members engaged with EU funds (ESF+, ERDF, RRF, AMIF, etc.)
• Those willing to influence national budget priorities and EU negotiations

Read the full call and express your interest by 15 May

You can confirm your interest by contacting Brisa Wiklund (brisa.wiklund@eurochild.org). Please also share a short description (max. 2 paragraphs) of your recent advocacy work targeting national and/or local authorities.

Eurochild strengthened its impact across Europe, engaging with members, allies and policymakers over 6,700 times and advocating for children’s rights in 406 meetings and events.

Our website published 150+ articles, was viewed 34,600+ times, and our social media messages reached 23,000+ people. Through our Flagship Report, we shared evidence‑based recommendations with EU institutions, drawing on contributions from 84 members in 36 countries.

Through the Daphne‑CHILD programme, we began re‑granting €1.3 million to 48 local organisations in 9 countries, expanding child protection services to 23,000 children, 3,200 families and 1,800 professionals. Through the GUIDE project, we supported guardians of unaccompanied children in 5 countries with practical manuals, listening circles, training and national advocacy.

In a year marked by rising far‑right narratives and attacks on civil society, Eurochild launched a campaign to counter anti‑rights movements. We continued to push for safer digital spaces for children and stronger action against online child sexual abuse.

We responded to emergencies in Ukraine and Palestine, and engaged policymakers 80+ times to advance the European Child Guarantee. We also successfully advocated for EU funding mechanisms, including the ESF+, to prioritise children’s well-being and fight child poverty.

We launched a new children’s council, NOVA, focused on children’s rights online. Across our work, we promoted meaningful child participation through collaboration with children, the UN, and EU institutions, producing child‑friendly materials and delivering training and events.

Want to dive deeper?

>> Read the Annual Report 2025, organised by topic, for a full picture of children’s rights and family support across Europe.

For further information, email Davide Rambaldi, Eurochild Communications Coordinator. 

Watch the video summary on YouTube or below:

This analysis assesses the Draft against the principal legal frameworks that govern the rights it engages: the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (“CRC”), read together with the relevant General Comments of the Committee on the Rights of the Child; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”), together with the General Comments of the Human Rights Committee; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (“ICESCR”); the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”), as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights; and the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, in light of the case law of the Constitutional Court.

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• Pilots to test promising, early-stage ideas
• Rigorous evaluations of solutions with traction
• Scale-ups of interventions with proven impact

Learn more and apply: www.div.fund/apply

The next European Union (EU) long-term budget has the potential to invest in every child in Europe and beyond by tackling child poverty and upholding their rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) – ensuring these rights are protected, respected, and actively promoted. As organisations working on children’s rights, we call on the EU to invest in all children, everywhere.

Therefore, we recommend the following: 

• Adopt a rights-based and child-centred EU budget. 
• Track investment in children and introduce a “child lens investing” approach across all EU funding instruments, by creating a transparent “child marker”.
• Ensure meaningful, inclusive and safe participation of children and organisations representing them.
• Allocate sufficient funds to social objectives and invest in eradicating child and family poverty.
• Continue to invest in preventing, responding to and combating violence against children. 
• Uphold child protection standards above security and migration management considerations. 
• Ensure that investment spending on EU external action prioritises the needs of children, particularly children living in crisis contexts. 

Read the full reaction

As I lead Eurochild’s work on children’s rights in the digital environment, on this day, I want to focus on the challenges girls face online. While gender-based issues do not only affect girls, girls’ experiences are often shaped by their gender, both online and offline. These challenges are often heightened by harmful algorithms and platform design.

In recent decades, progress has been made towards gender equality. However, this cannot be taken for granted, as we observe increasing polarisation and backlash against equality. One of the most serious consequences is the scale of online child sexual abuse, in which girls are particularly vulnerable. The Internet Watch Foundation found that girls comprised 97% of illegal AI-generated child sexual abuse material assessed in 2025.

Recommender systems in online platforms can intensify this by amplifying discriminatory content, as content is optimised for engagement and systematically favours content that triggers strong emotional responses and keeps users scrolling. The rise of the manosphere contributes to the spread and normalisation of misogynistic ideas, which can shape attitudes and also lead to violence. Research has shown that boys tend to encounter toxic and manosphere content within the first 26 minutes of scrolling on social media. This happens in a context in which we observe a widening gender gap among younger cohorts on gender equality and related attitudes in several countries.

Some trends are more subtle, but still reinforce restrictive and regressive ideas about the role of girls. The “tradwife” trend, for instance, promotes an idealised, heteronormative and narrow vision of femininity, and, depending on the creator ecosystem, can be pulled into broader anti-feminist narratives.

Girls are also often disproportionately affected by appearance-based pressures. While unattainable beauty standards can affect everybody, girls are especially exposed to content that encourages obsession with physical appearance, extreme dieting, and constant self-surveillance.

Discriminatory content and behaviours targeting girls are often closely linked with other forms of discrimination, including racism, ableism, and xenophobia, and many girls face intersecting forms of exclusion and violence.

While the online environment may not be the original source of gender-based inequalities, it can reproduce, intensify, and sometimes create new barriers to the equal enjoyment of rights, thereby violating the right to non-discrimination under Article 2 of the UNCRC, as well as related rights such as protection from violence, privacy, participation, development, and access to information.

On this International Girls in ICT Day, we need to remind ourselves that gender equality is an ongoing struggle that must be fought both offline and online. Those who design digital services shape how experiences and harms are recognised and addressed. Governments and tech companies have both legal and moral responsibilities to create digital environments that uphold the rights of girls and promote equality. Increasing the participation of girls and women in these fields is a question of equality, but is also essential to ensuring that digital services are designed, governed and moderated with greater awareness.

What does exposome mean?

It’s a scientific concept referring to all the environmental exposures a person experiences throughout their life and how they affect their health. The alliance was launched on 24 February 2026 during an event at the European Parliament in Brussels to address better the environmental and social causes of chronic diseases in Europe and shift EU policy toward prevention. The shared goal is reducing diseases like cancer and heart and lung conditions by tackling lifelong exposures that affect health and supporting healthy ageing. All the environmental, chemical, social, and lifestyle factors that influence health may account for up to 90% of negative health outcomes.

The Alliance has three main priorities:

• investing €1 billion in exposome research (including a long-term study of 10 million people),
• creating a European data system to connect health and environmental information,
• establishing a stronger EU framework to coordinate disease prevention efforts.

What’s Eurochild’s role?

We aim to ensure that Europe’s emerging prevention and public health agenda is child-centred, rights-based, and equity-driven, fully aligned with our 2026–2030 Strategic Framework. The Exposome Manifesto marks an important step forward for public health in Europe, not only because it calls for stronger prevention, better data, and coordinated EU action, but because it explicitly recognises human rights as a guiding principle.

For Eurochild, this matters. A human‑rights‑based approach is essential to understanding how environmental and social exposures shape children’s lives from the earliest stages. Children are not just a vulnerable group; they are rights‑holders, and their right to health, development, and protection must be central to any prevention agenda.

Across our work, from early childhood development to education equity and child poverty, Eurochild consistently highlights how early‑life experiences influence lifelong well-being. This is also at the heart of the European Child Guarantee, which aims to ensure that every child in Europe has access to essential services, including healthcare, education, nutrition, and housing. The Exposome approach reinforces what the Child Guarantee already recognises: to improve population health, we must start with children.

Further Information:

• visit europeanexposomeforum.eu
• email Dr Ally Dunhill, Eurochild Director of Policy, Advocacy and Communications
• Read the Alliance Manifesto

Eurochild welcomes the European Commission’s evaluation of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) and the opportunity to contribute to its future revision. While the AVMSD remains a key part of the EU framework, it is no longer fully suitable in a rapidly changing digital environment, where children increasingly access content through video-sharing platforms, algorithmic recommendation systems, and influencer-driven formats.

Children often encounter professionally produced, monetised, and highly persuasive audiovisual content through creators and platform interfaces that do not neatly fit into existing categories. The persuasive intent is often opaque. Children may also struggle to recognise and interpret disclosures, even when they are present. Research on sponsored influencer videos shows that disclosures can improve adolescents’ awareness of persuasive intent, but their effectiveness varies depending on age and format and does not fully prevent persuasive effects. In other words, children may still be influenced even when they understand that content is sponsored. Furthermore, the current categorisation of harmful content in the Directive fails to address a wide range of material that can negatively affect children’s mental health and development, including self-harm content, harmful beauty standards and dangerous online challenges.

This is particularly concerning in relation to sharenting and childfluencers, which Eurochild members increasingly identify as child-rights issues. These phenomena raise major concerns around privacy, child protection, consent and possible exploitation, yet often remain in a regulatory grey zone with inconsistent safeguards. Eurochild members in Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden have flagged these risks as especially alarming. In Greece, the sharing of children’s personal data and photographs online by adult caregivers is widespread. In Slovenia, families frequently post images of their children in promotional contexts, such as advertising products or destinations. In Italy, Malta and Romania, growing attention is being paid to safety and privacy in light of the rise of childfluencers. In Ireland, sharenting and childfluencers have become the subject of increasing scrutiny, raising concerns about child labour, privacy, safety and consent. A joint British-Irish study described this area as a “legal lacuna” that falls outside child labour, privacy, consent, and online safety laws.

At Eurochild, we call for more enforceable measures, including clear labelling, restrictions on harmful commercial content, including non-illegal, and safeguards against exploitative practices such as childfluencer monetisation and sharenting. The revised AVMSD should therefore provide clearer recognition of influencer content, stronger protections against harmful and exploitative commercial practices, and more effective safeguards for children where audiovisual content is monetised and distributed at scale. A revised Directive should adopt a rights-based, child-centred approach, aligned with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and ensure that children’s best interests are a primary consideration in the digital audiovisual environment.

For further information, contact Francesca Pisanu, EU Advocacy Officer.

For the past 4 years, Eurochild has advanced inclusive, equitable, and child rights-based education systems across Europe through our contribution to the European Commission’s Working Group (WG) on Schools: Subgroup on Pathways to School Success.

This Working Group brought together EU policymakers, national education ministries, and civil society stakeholders (including the Lifelong Learning Platform) to shape the EU’s new equitable education framework,  ‘Pathways to School Success‘, a policy initiative designed to improve educational outcomes and well-being for all learners and educators.

Eurochild’s contribution

Throughout the Working Groups mandate , Eurochild ensured  that child rights, participation and well-being were embedded in EU-level guidance, peer learning and policy development Our contributions included:

• Co-shaping the EU Council Recommendation on Pathways to School Success together with our members ICAM.
• Advising the EU Education Solidarity Group’s Policy guidance on supporting the inclusion of Ukrainian refugees in education together with ICAM.
• Providing feedback to the EU’s Roadmap for ensuring school success for all, a practical ‘living’ guide to implement ‘Pathways to School Success’.
• Developing 9 EU policy action briefs that translate evidence and peer learning into concrete guidance for educational authorities, teachers, school leaders, teacher educators, and other education professionals:
  • Whole-school and whole-system approaches to school success
  • Early identification of learner needs
  • Pedagogical approaches for inclusion
  • Social and emotional learning
  • Nurturing educational excellence
  • Local governance for inclusion
  • Authentic learner engagement
  • Key role of parents
  • A systemic approach to teacher well-being
• Strengthening the landmark EU Guidelines on well-being and mental health at school ensuring they reflect children’s rights and the realities faced by educators.
• Co-creating a child-friendly/accessible version of the EU Guidelines, together with the Eurochild Children’s Council and our member Learning for Well-being Foundation, making EU policy accessible to children and young people.

These outputs highlight persistent challenges that must be addressed to achieve equity in education across Europe, included in the Working Group’s final report on lessons learnt and considerations.

Looking ahead

Eurochild’s engagement in the Working Group s has helped embed children’s rights, well-being, equity, and child participation more firmly in European education policy.

We continue to advocate for these policies to be appropriately resourced and implemented so they translate into meaningful support for children – especially those in vulnerable situations- and for the educators that work with them.  

For more information on Eurochild’s work in education, contact Ciaran O’Donnell and Ally Dunhill.

This document summarises data and analysis from the Joint Employment Report (JER) 2026 (KE-01-26-049-EN-N), focusing on areas directly relevant to Eurochild’s work: child poverty and social exclusion, early childhood education and care, education and early school leaving, young people, families and gender, social protection, housing, and the European Child Guarantee.

Income data labelled ‘2024’ reflects 2023 incomes (EU-SILC methodology). Page references [p. X] are to the printed page numbers of the adopted report.

Please note: This information has been directly copied from the report; for further information please refer to the JER directly. Eurochild did not create or collect any of the data in this analysis. Please reference the original report if using this data.

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