Global Child Poverty and Well-being: measurement, concepts, policy and action

This edited volume is on child poverty worldwide and offers new data and analysis of the scale and nature of child poverty through a series of national and regional case studies. It focuses in particular on the latest developments in methodologies to measure child poverty, using multi-dimensional indicators. This research draws attention to child poverty as a pressing and global issue requiring new and innovative policy solutions. It is aimed at researchers, who are encouraged to utilize and build on the methodologies that are outlined, and at campaigners and policy makers, who are encouraged to use the evidence presented to put pressure on governments to design and implement more effective policies to reduce child poverty. It is argued that the methods presented could assist in the development of improved global and national policies.

The book opens with an explanation of the authors’ vision of what child poverty means in real terms, the history of the emergence of child poverty as an academic and policy issue, and the book’s methodological approach in seeking to measure it. A child-centred and rights-based definition of child poverty is favoured. This comes from the perspective that children have specific needs that are different to adults’, including (most importantly) nurturing and care, which must be fulfilled in order for children to reach adulthood and become “good citizens” within wider society. It is argued that the objective of the child-centred approach is to understand how to nurture communities and families in order that children acquire the necessary skills, knowledge and values to sustain democratic societies in the future. Special attention is given to issues of inequality, child rights, the girl child and environmental sustainability.
Child poverty is argued to be the outcome of inadequate access to basic needs that are more than monetary. It is argued that child poverty needs to be measured separately from general poverty, which tends to focus solely on income levels. This is because measures such as the World Bank’s “dollar a day” metric, framed purely in economic terms, are highly problematic and conceal a far larger number of children living with deprivation of basic needs than the number of income-poor households included in the statistics. A multi-dimensional approach to measuring child poverty is therefore favoured, which should use both monetary and non-monetary indicators.

This volume has four parts and 23 chapters. Part I outlines the key debates, including the potential of international human rights frameworks as a mechanism to ensure accountability for children’s basic needs, current obstacles preventing these rights from being upheld (Chapter 2), and a critique of the assumption that economic growth (within a free market economy) is sufficient to reduce poverty (Chapter 3). Part II introduces the principles of multi-dimensional methodologies to measure child poverty, outlining a series of alternative approaches and data sources. These include the “Bristol approach” (Chapter 5) and the socially perceived necessities approach, in which basic needs are not prescribed and children themselves are asked to distinguish necessities from luxuries (Chapter 6). Results from the socially perceived necessities approach are presented from South Africa, showing significant differences in the prioritization of particular items (such as food, own bed, school transport, etc.) between children and adults, with implications for how “basic services” are defined in policy. Chapter 10 identifies the main sources of data about policies and policy outcomes that are available to researchers, and proposes a child policy paradigm that may be used to analyze these.

Part III presents case studies from Tanzania, Congo Brazzaville, Vietnam, Iran, Haiti and two regional level studies of the Caribbean region and Latin America, and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. These document the empirical results and analys