Five gaps in the post-2030 agenda for women, children and adolescents

What we asked the WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and PMNCH evidence review to examine, and why well-being belongs in it.

By Prof. Luis Miguel Gallardo · 28 October 2026

The Sustainable Development Goal era ends in 2030, and the targets for maternal, newborn, child and adolescent survival will not all be met. WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and PMNCH have begun a two-year evidence review on what it will take to protect and advance the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents after that date, and they opened a public call for the priority topics the review should examine (the call is here).

The Global Strategy that has guided this field since 2016 named its ambition in three words: Survive, Thrive, Transform. Almost everything it measures belongs to the first word. The World Happiness Foundation Research Lab submitted five topics that belong to the second. Here they are, with our reasoning.

1. Women's mental health where women actually work

Most women of reproductive age in low- and middle-income countries earn their living in informal or home-based work: artisanal production, agriculture, domestic and care work. No occupational health system reaches them, and their daily stress, income insecurity and isolation shape the outcomes of their children. The evidence on brief, group-based, non-specialist practices (breath, meditation, yoga, peer circles, creative expression) is real but scattered across disciplines, and almost none of it treats the workplace as the delivery platform. We proposed an evidence synthesis and implementation review, drawing on our own work with women weavers in Rajasthan with the Jaipur Rugs Foundation and on a registered systematic review already under way with Shoolini University.

2. Who heals the healers

Every target for maternal and newborn survival depends on midwives, nurses and community health workers, a workforce that is mostly female, under-paid, exposed to trauma and leaving the profession. Burnout and attrition are documented in every region, yet workforce strategies still treat well-being as an individual resilience problem. We proposed a synthesis of what protects the mental health of this workforce at three levels, individual, team and system, and an estimate of the retention and service-continuity returns of investing in it. This is the question behind our Heal the Healers programme.

3. Adolescents: beyond symptom reduction

Adolescent mental health is the fastest-growing area of unmet need, and schools are the only platform that reaches adolescents every day. Two decades of research on mindfulness, compassion training, social-emotional learning and peace education in classrooms are rarely read together: mental-health reviews count symptoms, education reviews count learning, peace-education reviews count attitudes. We proposed an umbrella review across those silos, with case studies from conflict-affected settings and an investment case that counts health, education and social-cohesion returns together.

4. Measuring what Thrive means

Subjective well-being, life satisfaction and the capacity to regulate oneself under pressure are the outcomes women and adolescents name first, and none of them is tracked. The main global well-being instruments were not designed for these populations or for the national statistics of low- and middle-income countries. We proposed a critical review of existing frameworks and a feasibility analysis of adding well-being modules to the surveys countries already run, so that a post-2030 framework can measure Thrive without building new systems. This builds on the Lab's 2026 review of the World Happiness Report framework and on the FP20 scale for Fundamental Peace, offered as one candidate instrument among several.

5. Cities, where well-being is decided

By 2030 most women, children and adolescents will live in cities, and the determinants that matter after survival, safety, green space, care infrastructure, social connection, are decided at municipal level. A growing number of cities have adopted explicit well-being frameworks, but nobody has assessed what they do for women and children, and the frameworks rarely disaggregate by sex, age or life stage. We proposed case studies across income levels using a common diagnostic, drawing on our Cities of Happiness network, and a light accountability template cities can adopt.

What we are and are not saying

These are suggestions. A multi-agency technical working group will decide which topics are commissioned, and the analyses will be written in 2027 and 2028. We will contribute to the consultation as it continues, and we will report here on what comes of it.

Why it matters to us is simpler. The mission of the World Happiness Foundation is ten billion free, conscious and happy people by 2050. The well-being of a mother in a loom shed, of a midwife on a night shift and of a fourteen-year-old in a classroom is where that mission either begins or does not. We think the evidence base should say so.