Data on childhood obesity and poverty will be gathered and analysed to tackle the problems as part of a Unicef project with the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish government.
The Data for Children Collaborative project, launched today, will aim to improve understanding of what can be done to address the issues and discover more about their precise causes.
Scientists in Edinburgh will look at a vast range of data, including what children are eating and their exercise habits, and how these are influenced by different settings and locations.
Quick read: ‘Cookery lessons should be compulsory in schools’
Childhood poverty: Schools to be offered training on impact of poverty
Outdoor play: Officially ‘fundamental’ to learning
It is hoped the findings from Scotland - focusing on childhood obesity, poverty and population - can then be used across the world “to save time, money and lives”.
Globally, 40 million children under the age of five and 340 million between the ages of five and 18 are estimated to be obese, while 29 per cent of Scottish children are clinically overweight.
Lucinda Rivers, head of Unicef in Scotland, said: “Unicef’s mission is to drive better results for more children, but we can only do this by using the power of evidence to deliver a better understanding of some of the challenges they face.
“We are grateful to the Scottish government and the University of Edinburgh for supporting this ambition through their support of the Data for Children Collaborative.”
She added: “The world-leading data science and artificial intelligence capabilities now available to Unicef through this collaboration will help us achieve better results for more children.”
The data on children will be gathered from both the public and private sectors, with strict guidelines on how it can be used and shared.
Unicef delivery director Alex Hutchison said: “Each project has the potential to make a real, positive impact on children’s lives worldwide.
“Pairing insights with data enables us to better understand what is driving childhood obesity and child poverty, and more accurate population estimates will help develop a widely scalable approach to tackling hugely important issues.”
Kate Forbes, the Scottish government’s digital economy minister, said: “This is an innovative programme that will help to deliver new ways of tackling childhood obesity and child poverty, on a local, national and international scale.
“We are in a very strong position in Scotland to deliver this type of world-leading data analysis that helps to save time, money and lives.”
The minister added: “I am very excited about this collaboration, through partnering with organisations that share our vision for the role of data in improving the lives of children both in Scotland and globally.”
