Central database on Hong Kong’s under-18s under consideration, minister announces
- Law Chi-kwong says compiling figures could help policymaking and setting priorities for child policy
- But it will not be launched until 2021 at the earliest
Action on youth issues such as child abuse and child poverty in Hong Kong could be set for a shot in the arm after the welfare chief announced he was looking into making a central database on the city’s about 1 million under-18s.
But it would only come as early as in 2021 after a consultancy study, prompting children’s rights advocates to urge departments to release data currently held.
The database would pull together child-related statistics, existing or new, across departments. It is intended to help policymakers and NGOs, by letting them cross-reference different sets of data from departments.
The welfare minister Law Chi-kwong wrote on his blog on Sunday that, in principle, compiling figures could help policymaking and setting priorities for child policy, but warned that the task’s scale and complexity could bring challenges.
He raised Britain’s attempt in 2003 to push for a database on children, called ContactPoint, which was eventually shelved because of privacy concerns. He also cited Hong Kong’s digitisation of medical records, which needed seven years of study and law drafting before the system came in.
