A Maori child advocacy group is calling for culturally specific measurement tools for Maori children.
Mana Ririki made the call following the release of the Child Poverty Monitor, which found a quarter of the country's children live in poverty. Maori children are twice as likely as Europeans to live in poor households.
The group says te reo Maori, spirituality and culture are important influences for Maori health, and need to be considered when measuring their development.
Mana Ririki executive director Anton Blank says the challenge is how to quantify the importance of these domains for tamariki Maori and develop them into a measurement tool.
Defining those domains will give a uniquely Maori snapshot of tamariki well-being, and will more easily enable the development of Maori solutions, which he says are most likely to succeed.
Mr Blank says Maori well-being should not be measured by comparing them to other groups.
