Poverty is a concept that concerns the individual. However, the most common poverty indicator—income (or expenditures)—is measured at the household level and then simply divided by the number of members, or “adult equivalents,” in the household to obtain individual values. This assumes that all household members share fortunes and misfortunes equally, which is particularly problematic in the case of children. Parental altruism might lead some adults to sacrifice part of their resources in favor of their children. Alternatively, as a survival strategy, some parents may sacrifice the weakest of their children. This paper uses a recent and innovative Bangladeshi survey, including detailed information on individual calorie intake, to shed light on two questions. First, what is the role played by intra- household allocations in mitigating or exacerbating child poverty? Second, what is the scale of the measurement errors resulting from not considering intra-household allocation in the measurement of child poverty?

In 2006-07, UNICEF and Save the Children UK in Bosnia and Herzegovina supported government and non-governmental organizations to develop and pilot a Child Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA) to assess the potential impact of electricity sector reform on children. The CRIA exposed the negative impact of potential electricity price increases on children’s access to health, education and social protection. Household strategies to respond to price increases would also negatively affect children’s health, increase child labor, reduce children’s access to information and increase girls’ and women’s workload. The pilot study proposed child rights indicators for monitoring and reinforced the need for mitigation measures. This article outlines the CRIA approach and results and discusses the potential role of CRIA as a tool to assist governments to assess compliance with child rights obligations during policy development and implementation.

Hundreds of millions of children in developing countries are growing up in squalid conditions, yet anti-poverty policies targeted at children tend to focus upon human capital interventions such as improved schooling, healthcare and nutrition through school nutrition/feeding programs. The primary concern seems to be with children as future citizens who need human capital interventions in order to ensure they will be productive workers when they grow up. However, children are not future citizens, they are current citizens with human rights that are independent of and equal to those of the adults with whom they live. There is certainly a need for human capital interventions in education and health, but children’s needs for better living conditions are equally or more important. Squalid living conditions can kill young children and make older children sick and miserable. Better health care can treat the symptoms but not the causes of this ill health.

Very little is known about civil society in Iran. Debates about this topic are usually highly politicized, often based on misunderstandings about the nature of Iranian civil society, overestimating its capacity for mediation and social change and ignoring its constructive role in society. This paper analyses in detail the role of Iranian civil society organizations in the social development of the country with a focus on the realization of child rights. Such a perspective offers the best way to empower civil society under the existing national and international conditions even though political spaces for non-governmental organizations are currently shrinking in Iran. The paper concludes that Iran’s civil society is a heterogeneous group that needs strong support in institutional capacity building. Approaches towards civil society in Iran should take into account the different advantages of modern and more traditional types of organizations. Civil society organizations working for children and youth need to find ways to collaborate and advocate with sectoral ministries and other specialized government agencies. For these relationships to work, additional efforts to foster mutual understanding between government and civil society, as well as between religious charities and semi-public organizations and NGOs, are necessary. Finally, financial and other support to NGOs in Iran is best provided through multilateral organizations.

This paper shows that children who are disadvantaged by their environments have educational outcomes that lag behind those of other children, despite the fact that it has been more than ten years since the implementation of the Universal Primary Education (UPE) program in Uganda. While UPE has had a positive impact on access to education among children, improved indicators for education quality (i.e., pupil/teacher ratio, pupil/classroom ratio and pupil/textbook ratio) and ensured gender equity in enrollment, the program nonetheless has not fully captured learning outcomes for some one million pupils considered disadvantaged in Uganda. These include girls, physically disabled children, orphans, street children, internally displaced children, nomadic children and very poor children. Nevertheless, the Ugandan government, working with a host of donors and employing a sector-wide approach to education, has initiated a number of non-formal education programs that have sought with varying degrees of success to address disadvantaged children’s access barriers to basic education.

The multidimensional nature of poverty has long been acknowledged; even persons with sufficient financial resources may be unable to achieve satisfactory levels of well-being in other dimensions. However, traditional monetary poverty analyses still play a predominant role in the formulation of poverty reduction strategies. In this paper we analyze the consequences of using monetary poverty as a proxy for deprivation in the physical environment of children in the Republic of Congo by studying the degree of overlap between these dimensions. Our results indicate that incidence rates of poverty and deprivation differ substantially in magnitude; that high risk poverty characteristics do not necessarily correspond to high risk deprivation characteristics; and that the relation between poverty and deprivation in the physical environment is positive but not very strong. We conclude that monetary poverty indicators are a blunt tool for identifying vulnerable groups with regard to dimensions of the physical environment.

This paper analyzes how economic policies can influence parents’ decisions about their children’s schooling, household work and leisure in South Africa. Using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model that integrates both market and non-market activities, distinguishing male and female workers on the one hand, and adult and child non-market work and leisure on the other, we find that, in the context of trade liberalization, gender inequality is likely to rise between adults and between boys and girls. Furthermore, the paper notes that the increase in adult male and female market labor supply is made possible through the substitution of children for parents in household work , although more so in some groups than others. These effects sustain in the long run.

Using unique data from four developing countries, this paper explores the relationship between material poverty and the psychosocial competencies of children. Within a cohort of 12-year-olds, we find that measures of self-efficacy, sense of inclusion, self-esteem and educational aspirations all correlate with measures of the material well-being of the family in which they are growing up. In short, material circumstances shape these wider dimensions of child well-being. As other evidence has shown, these measures of psychosocial competencies reflect important life skills that affect children as adults and shape their future socio- economic status. This suggests a mechanism by which poverty may be transmitted across generations. In addition, our evidence shows how a caregiver’s education and school participation affects children’s psychosocial competencies. This may indicate a possible means of overcoming such transmission of poverty over time.

Nepal’s extraordinary political transition to peace and democracy has raised great expectations of social change. The complex situation of pervasive poverty and social exclusion exacerbated by Nepal's physical environment, as well as the post conflict economic stagnation, call for new policy interventions. Based on political, economic and social arguments, the paper makes the case for strengthening social protection with the specific proposal of introducing a child grant—a cash transfer from the government to families with children—which is presented as a possible "building block" in the country's social protection system. It is also argued that a grant could be more effective at addressing both child well-being and the broader challenges of poverty and inequality if it were universal and unconditional. The paper draws on primary data collected through surveys and focus group discussions, combined with secondary sources and the authors' involvement in some of the policy processes. It thus also represents a case study on the "theory and practice" of developing child-sensitive social protection in a post-conflict environment.

This article analyzes how children in Ethiopia respond to household adversity in the context of poverty. It highlights the association between poverty and other forms of hardship and the complex interplay of risk and protective factors in young people’s lives. It argues that identifying adversity is not straightforward because beliefs affect the outcomes of such experiences, and different cultures and actors hold different views on the matter, so that assumed risks can in some cases be protective and foster specific competencies in the young. To support this argument, children’s work—often viewed as a risk—and their role in preventing and mitigating household hardship are underlined as a potential source of protection, resilience and skills development. In this way, the limitations of research that focuses solely on detrimental child outcomes of risk exposure are revealed and the need for a more nuanced, multi-actor view of these processes is emphasized.

Poverty matters for children's and youths' psychological and physical health. Using experience sampling methodology over a four-day period, we show that the hour-to-hour experiences of white, low- and middle-income youth (M= 17.12 years) are different. Poor rural youth in the United States experience more hassles and stressors than their middle-income counterparts. This is particularly true for the family setting. However, physical and social stressors appear equally prominent for low- and middle-income adolescents. Family socioeconomic status does not appear to influence stressor exposure at school or with friends. These data are drawn from a neglected population in the stress l iterature, namely low- and middle-income children living in rural households.

In examining general trends of child well-being in Tanzania from the early 1990s to the present, there are only a few areas in which there have been improvements for all groups within any indicator. In this paper we concentrate on under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) and education. We also explore some of the environmental (housing, water, and sanitation) and some poverty-related (malnutrition, immunization) elements which may help explain the U5MR trends. Education has enjoyed the most progress in terms of an increase in access and reduction of the gender gap. Progress in the area of nutrition, sanitation, and DTP3 immunization has been uneven, with certain sections of society advancing while others remain stagnant or advance at a much slower pace. This has resulted in growing inequalities in these indicators. Unless the benefits of better nutrition, access to water, and sanitation and immunization start to spread throughout the population, it is likely that disparities in U5MR will increase and advances in average U5MR will slow down.