Computable Gap Assessment of Artificial Intelligence Governance in Children's Centres: Evidence-Mechanism-Governance-Indicator Modelling of UNICEF's Guidance on AI and Children 3.0 Based on the Graph-GAP Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces Graph-GAP, a methodology for assessing governance gaps in AI policies for children by decomposing requirements into a structured graph and computing metrics to identify and prioritize governance improvements.

Contribution

The paper presents Graph-GAP, a novel framework that systematically decomposes policy requirements into evidence, mechanism, governance, and indicator layers, enabling computable gap analysis for child-centered AI governance.

Findings

Child well-being and development requirements show significant gaps.

Explainability and accountability requirements are often under-implemented.

Cross agency implementation needs prioritized actions.

Abstract

This paper tackles practical challenges in governing child centered artificial intelligence: policy texts state principles and requirements but often lack reproducible evidence anchors, explicit causal pathways, executable governance toolchains, and computable audit metrics. We propose Graph-GAP, a methodology that decomposes requirements from authoritative policy texts into a four layer graph of evidence, mechanism, governance, and indicator, and that computes two metrics, GAP score and mitigation readiness, to identify governance gaps and prioritise actions. Using the UNICEF Innocenti Guidance on AI and Children 3.0 as primary material, we define reproducible extraction units, coding manuals, graph patterns, scoring scales, and consistency checks, and we demonstrate exemplar gap profiles and governance priority matrices for ten requirements. Results suggest that compared with privacy and data protection, requirements related to child well being and development, explainability and accountability, and cross agency implementation and resource allocation are more prone to indicator gaps and mechanism gaps. We recommend translating requirements into auditable closed loop governance that integrates child rights impact assessments, continuous monitoring metrics, and grievance redress procedures. At the coding level, we introduce a multi algorithm review aggregation revision workflow that runs rule based encoders, statistical or machine learning evaluators, and large model evaluators with diverse prompt configurations as parallel coders. Each extraction unit outputs evidence, mechanism, governance, and indicator labels plus readiness scores with evidence anchors. Reliability, stability, and uncertainty are assessed using Krippendorff alpha, weighted kappa, intraclass correlation, and bootstrap confidence intervals.