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The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) welcomes China's recent decision to include the establishment of a sound service system to provide care to children left behind by their migrating parents in the country's framework of poverty alleviation.

The Decision on Winning the Battle of Poverty Alleviation, a comprehensive document jointly released by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on December 7, 2015, sheds light on developing a service system for the population left behind, including children, women and the elderly, as well as the disabled. It vows to strengthen the infrastructure and capacity building of children's places in communities, among others, to continuously improve their management and service level.

UNICEF congratulates the Government on the adoption of the model of community-based centres for child welfare and protection services in the poverty alleviation work.

As an emergency response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, UNICEF and the National Working Committee on Children and Women (NWCCW) introduced the Child-Friendly Spaces model to China. Due to the success of the Child-Friendly Space programme during and after the response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the model was adopted as a good practice by the Government of China, leading to massive replication in non-emergency areas nationwide. It is also supported by national policy, which sets a goal to establish by 2020, children's places providing recreation, non-formal education, psychosocial support and referral services to children and their families in 90 per cent of all urban and rural communities across China.

Such a model could help ensure timely identification of highly vulnerable children and their families, facilitate their referral to social assistance and basic social services or targeted protection services and support vulnerable caregivers to meet their childcare role.

UNICEF stands ready to continue its support to the Government of China to bring access to and quality of welfare and protection services to the most disadvantaged children in the new five-year UNICEF Country Programme for China (2016-2020).