The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has identified six key commitments that the presidential candidates in Sri Lanka can promise to implement after they take up office in 2020.

Issuing a statement on ‘Ara Wade: A Vote For Children’ – a campaign to demand every presidential candidate to prioritize the rights of children – the UNICEF pointed out that Sri Lanka made a commitment to protect and ful¬fill the rights of children, by adopting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

UNICEF noted that Sri Lanka has made several commendable strides towards this commitment, including lifting millions of families from extreme poverty, drastically reducing mortality rates for children under 5 and achieving an almost-universal primary school attendance for children.

The organization has identified six critical areas – nutrition, education, child poverty, corporal punishment, unity and climate change - that need to be urgently addressed by Sri Lanka.

With the upcoming presidential polls, the organization has proposed a list of 6 key commitments that the presidential candidates can promise to implement when they take office.

Focusing on areas that require timely and urgent action, the campaign has come up with the following commitments:

• Ending child malnutrition forever, including by addressing Sri Lanka’s child malnutrition problem by increasing investment into community-based care and treatment of acute malnutrition.
• Building an education system that prepares our young for the future, including by ensuring that every school places the child at the center.
• Giving every child a fair chance to succeed by ending child poverty, including through the establishment of a universal child benefit, as a concrete means to smoothing disparities, eliminating child poverty, and ensuring the right start in life for all children.
• Banning damaging physical punishment against children, including by legally and explicitly prohibiting any act of physical force or humiliating action while promoting and implementing positive methods of disciplining children.
• Creating an inclusive and peaceful Sri Lanka for all, including through putting the National Action Plan on Education for Social Cohesion and Peace into action.
• Fighting climate change and preparing Sri Lanka for its effects, including prioritizing the conservation and restoration of forests, wetlands and other ecosystems and ensuring all government ministries consider the environmental impact of future programs while supporting climate change adaptation.

‘Ara Wade: A Vote For Children’ also aims to create awareness among the Sri Lankan public of the 6 critical needs of children, with the public encouraged to visit www.arawade.lk to ask all candidates, via an online letter, to make this vital commitment.