Global Child Poverty and Well-Being

Measurement, Concepts, Policy and Action

Minujin, Alberto, Nandy, Shailen, Alberto Minujin, Shailen Nandy

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781847424822
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447312765
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Child poverty is a central and present part of global life, with hundreds of millions of children around the world enduring tremendous suffering and deprivation of their most basic needs. Despite its long history, research on poverty and development has only relatively recently examined the issue of child poverty as a distinct topic of concern. This book brings together theoretical, methodological and policy-relevant contributions by leading researchers on international child poverty.

With a preface from Sir Richard Jolly, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, it examines how child poverty and well-being are now conceptualized, defined and measured, and presents regional and national level portraits of child poverty around the world, in rich, middle income and poor countries. The book's ultimate objective is to promote and influence policy, action and the research agenda to address one of the world's great ongoing tragedies: child poverty, marginalization and inequality.

PART 1

ONE

Introduction

Shailen Nandy and Alberto Minujin

In December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted, for the first time, an international definition of child poverty. It recognised that:

… children living in poverty are deprived of nutrition, water and sanitation facilities, access to basic health-care services, shelter, education, participation and protection, and that while a severe lack of goods and services hurts every human being, it is most threatening and harmful to children, leaving them unable to enjoy their rights, to reach their full potential and to participate as full members of society. (UNGA, 2006, para 460)

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the agency charged with promoting international child welfare and which had campaigned for agreement on a definition, noted:

Measuring child poverty can no longer be lumped together with general poverty assessments which often focus solely on income levels, but must take into consideration access to basic social services, especially nutrition, water, sanitation, shelter, education and information. (UNICEF, 2007)

These internationally accepted and agreed statements and definitions were a major step forward for everyone interested in the issues of child well-being and child poverty. The definitions provided a clear and unambiguous direction to governments, advocacy groups and others interested in dealing with child poverty as to which dimensions future research and indicators needed to reflect. The measurement and analysis of child poverty requires consideration of a wide range of non-monetary dimensions and factors, all of which are known to have a well-documented impact on children’s survival, well-being and development. These dimensions include, as the definitions set out: children’s living conditions, their access to basic services, their ability to participate in normal society as full citizens, the right to be free of any kind of discrimination and exclusion and their rights to protection from exploitation and abuse. In summary, this measurement and analysis addresses equal opportunities for all boys and girls in all countries and all situations. When viewed in conjunction with the sentiments expressed in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), where state parties were enjoined under Article 27 (among others) ‘to recognise the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, moral and social development’ (UN, 1989), two things are apparent. First, evidence from around the world, from rich, middle-income and poor countries alike, confirms that many millions of children continue to experience deep poverty, deprivation and exclusion (Micklewright and Stewart, 2001; Gordon et al, 2003; Richardson et al, 2008). Second, that despite the binding commitments of the UNCRC over 20 years ago, the most basic rights of children continue to be infringed (van Bueren, 2002; Redmond, 2008).

This book presents a collection of work by leading international academics, researchers and policy makers concerned with the measurement and mitigation of child poverty. It brings together many of the actors involved in the development of indicators and measures of child poverty and well-being, and through a series of national and regional level case studies, demonstrates how research on child poverty has developed over the last two decades. Until 1999, few researchers concentrated on child poverty as a concern that deserved special emphasis. Poverty meant adult and household poverty, and the prevalent approach to measurement relied on income/consumption indicators. No information on child poverty was available at a global or regional level, and only a handful of countries estimated the number of children living in income-poor households. In 1999, the UN Expert Group on Poverty Statistics met in Portugal and researchers such as Alberto Minujin and Peter Townsend made the case for documenting child poverty in statistical and policy terms. The concept at that meeting was based on the over-representation of children among the poor and utilised only the money metric approach. By the end of 1999, however, UNICEF, under the leadership of Jan Vandemoortele, Enrique Delamonica and Alberto Minujin, furthered the effort by coining the phrase ‘Poverty reduction starts with children’ (UNICEF, 2000b) in order to influence the design and implementation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), which had recently been established by the World Bank. In 2003, a research team led by Professors Peter Townsend and David Gordon, produced the first ever global estimates of child poverty for UNICEF (Gordon et al, 2003) as an outgrowth of the Portugal meetings and UNICEF action plan. When data from the report were used in the State of the World’s Children 2005 report (UNICEF, 2004) to show that over one billion children were severely deprived of one or more basic needs, there was immediate and widespread recognition that more needed to be done to tackle child poverty. In the years that followed, academics and activists developed an international network of actors, all of whom were involved in developing research on child well-being and poverty. With the issue of child poverty now placed at the centre of the international stage, there was (and continues to be) a significant increase in activity and research on child poverty around the world (Boyden et al, 2003; Feeny and Boyden, 2003; Minujin and Delamonica, 2003; Seager and de Wet, 2003; White et al, 2003; Noble et al, 2004, 2006; Corak, 2005; G.A. Jones, 2005; N. Jones, 2005; Minujin et al, 2005, 2006; Delamonica and Minujin, 2007; Lyytikainen et al, 2006; Doek et al, 2009; Nandy and Gordon, 2009; Jones and Sumner, 2011).

Much of this activity built on another earlier body of work about children and poverty, typified by UNICEF’s landmark study Adjustment with a human face (Cornia et al, 1987). The report detailed the impact on children of another global financial crisis (during the 1980s), and called for the collection and use of data on the ‘human’ dimensions of adjustment. Such data might include information about people’s access to education and health services, rather than just conventional macroeconomic indicators. It also noted the need for status (or impact) indicators (for example, nutrition status, education level), process indicators (for example, availability of food, or education), and input indicators at three levels: household, government and community (Stewart, 1987, p 258). To assess the impacts on children of the by then widely implemented policies of structural adjustment, the report argued one would need to know how different input indicators affected the process indicators, and in turn how these affected status indicators. At the time, reliable and readily accessible household survey data for most poor countries were scarce, but Adjustment with a human face demonstrated that data on the ‘human’ dimension were available, from different sources such as nutrition surveys and hospital records. These, it argued, could be used to create a ‘composite index of social stress’ to serve as an early warning system to denote when conditions for children were unfavourable and likely to have a negative impact on them. Components of such an index could include indicators of malnutrition, cases of Kwashiorkor or other important diseases, the proportion of babies born with a low birth weight, food prices in regional markets and even rainfall patterns. In time, other indicators could be added, but what was key was the call to incorporate into conventional econometric and planning models those factors that directly affected children. The report concluded that ‘it is important to aim at a systematic set of human accounts, on a par with the economic accounts’ (p 264) and that ‘information is not a luxury to be added on as an afterthought … but an essential pre-requisite for devising good programmes’ (p 262). Given the current ongoing global financial crisis, it is perhaps obvious that we recommend readers revisit the arguments and issues covered in Adjustment with a human face (Cornia et al, 1987), as well as other work from the era (MacPherson, 1987; Cornia et al, 1992; Kent, 1995) which examined child poverty on its own merits. UNICEF’s current Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities (see Chapter Twenty-One, this volume) is detailing the impact of the current economic crisis on children around the world (Mendoza, 2009).

The chapters of this book focus primarily on the measurement of child poverty. They provide insights into recent theoretical, methodological and policy developments, from a number of geographic and intellectual positions. In doing so, the book benefits from material from case studies on countries that might not otherwise have appeared alongside each other. Important empirical work from countries as diverse as Congo Brazzaville, Tanzania, South Africa, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Morocco, Iran and Haiti is presented, to show how, even in challenging contexts, research on children is developing in new and innovative ways. Wider regional level portraits are also presented, with analyses of the European Union (EU), the United States (US), and countries of Central and Eastern Europe/Commonwealth of Independent States (CEE/CIS), of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The methodological discussions presented in each chapter provide readers with a wide range of information about working with multidimensional child poverty measures, and may suggest analyses that could be applied in other countries. Many of the chapters present data to show changes over time, and these will no doubt form key sources of information for future studies aiming to assess progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the target date of 2015. Their importance is accentuated given there is no single distinct goal or target for child poverty per se. However, given the ever-increasing availability of household survey data and developments in various methodologies, it is reasonable to expect that in the not too distant future, specific global targets for child poverty might be set and adopted as they have already been in some regions (European Commission, 2008; OECD, 2009).

Who is this book for?

Given child poverty is acknowledged to be the result of overlapping dimensions of deprivation, as well as the non-fulfilment of many basic economic, social and human rights, this book is intended for an audience from many disciplines. We hope it will be of use and interest to specialists in their fields, as well as those with a more general interest in the topic. Where relevant, each chapter sets out its working definition of child poverty, the conceptual approach taken, and relates these to the indicators developed and used. The presentation of empirical data on child poverty and disparities should give policy makers and advocates of children’s rights sufficient evidence on which to challenge the shape of existing policies when they clearly appear to fail. We hope the methodologies described and tested here will encourage others to make their own forays into research, applying what is shown here to their own countries and contexts.

Outline of the book

The book has four main parts, and between each there will inevitably be some degree of overlap. The first part includes this introduction, as well as two chapters that set out some of the key debates relating to the study of child poverty and its measurement. Chapter Two, by Simon Pemberton and colleagues, examines international human rights frameworks and conventions to reveal their potential as mechanisms to hold key international players, both governmental and non-governmental, to account when children’s basic needs are unmet and rights thus infringed. It details a series of practical obstacles which stand in the way of ensuring that rights are realised, and how these might be overcome, given sufficient political and popular will. It also shows how children’s rights and child poverty are closely linked, and how, using methods similar to those used by other contributors to this book, an account can be made of how children’s rights continue to be violated, despite governments having agreed clear core obligations to meet such rights.

Chapter Three, by Jan Vandemoortele, tackles the issue of economic growth, until recently depicted as the sine qua non for development and poverty reduction. He argues that an idea which has dominated international development discourse – that economic growth is a sufficient condition to reduce poverty – is flawed on a number of levels, and that the key international metric of international poverty – the so-called ‘dollar-a-day’ poverty line – is particularly problematic. He sets out his reasons, with evidence, and builds a strong case for a greater focus on issues of equity and the need to ensure that any poverty reduction strategy considers at its core, the needs of and implications for children. Given international concerns about the global financial crisis, and growing recognition of the need to protect those least responsible for the crisis, he posits that ‘child-focused policies can be a Trojan horse for introducing equity-enhancing measures in social and economic policy making’ which would benefit societies as a whole.

Part 2 builds on some of the themes raised by the chapters in Part 1, and shows how different measures of child poverty, deprivation and well-being can be developed and applied. Chapter Four, by David Gordon and Shailen Nandy, sets out in some detail what has come to be known as the ‘Bristol Approach’ (Minujin et al, 2005; Roelen and Gassmann, 2008). It explains the theory and rationale behind the approach, showing how it built on the long history of poverty research in the UK and around the world. The chapter also provides a critique of some other commonly used measures, including the World Bank’s popular ‘US$1/day’ indicator, the Asset Ownership-based Wealth Index also developed by the World Bank (Filmer and Pritchett, 1998, 2001), and the recently developed Multidimensional Poverty Index (Alkire and Santos, 2010), which replaces the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Poverty Index (HPI). Chapter Five, by Sabina Alkire and José Manuel Roche, shows how researchers are building on the ‘Bristol Approach’, to develop indicators that reflect the depth, intensity and composition of multidimensional poverty. Using data from Bangladesh, they set out the Alkire and Foster method for developing a multidimensional poverty indicator for children under the age of five. They experiment with varying thresholds and cut-offs to show how sensitivity analyses can be used to refine such indicators, and then present, in detail, changes in the index over a 10-year period (1997–2007) at both national and subnational level.

Chapter Six, by Helen Barnes and Gemma Wright of the University of Oxford, presents a different approach to assessing child poverty. Their work is part of a wider project on the measurement of poverty in South Africa (Noble et al, 2004, 2006), which involves, among other things, the application of the socially perceived necessities approach (Mack and Lansley, 1985; Halleröd, 1994; Gordon and Pantazis, 1997). Poverty in this instance is treated as an en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4