How should we measure child poverty?

This ProgBlog article written by Robbie Lawrence, Wikichild Coordinator, is part of the Wikiprogress Post-2015 series.

“Children living in poverty experience deprivation of the material, spiritual, and emotional resources needed to survive, develop and thrive, leaving them unable to enjoy their rights, achieve their full potential or participate as full and equal members of society” (UNICEF, 2005)

As many of you will know, we are currently running an online consultation* entitled “Reducing poverty is achievable: Finding those who are hidden by inequalities” on the Wikiprogress platform. The comments we have had up to this point have been interesting and diverse, ranging from practical suggestions for tackling inequalities in the new Post 2015 framework to personal reflections on how the problem affects the lives of everyday people around the world. This article will first assess the dangers inequalities pose to children and then provide an analysis of current methods of measuring child poverty referencing UNICEF’s ‘Child Poverty and Inequality – New Perspectives’ report, published in 2012.

In late January 2013, at the Third High Level Meeting on advancing a Post 2015 Development Agenda, Prof Gita Sen stipulated that the forum should give special attention to the most vulnerable people, in particular children, youth and adolescents. Save the Children’s report ‘Born Equal: How reducing inequality could give our children a better future’ shows that children bear the brunt of inequality, demonstrating that in some cases children born into the richest households have access to 35 times the resources of the poorest.

Children as a group experience the detriments of poverty differently from adults. While an adult may suffer poverty over a certain period, falling into poverty during childhood can alter a person’s life indefinitely – ‘rarely does a child get a second chance at an education or a healthy start in life.’ (New Perspectives, page 1) EFA’s Global Monitoring Report stresses that early childhood is the 'critical period' in which the foundations for success in education and beyond should be put in place. Even short periods of malnutrition threaten a child’s ability to grow physically and intellectually, impacting their long-term development.

It is important to emphasize that while on a micro level, inequality impedes the right of every child to have an equal chance to survive and thrive, widening disparities in income have been shown to compromise a country's economic growth, damage well-being outcomes and threaten poverty reduction. Child poverty endangers not only the individual, but it is likely to spread to future generations, entrenching and perpetuating inequality in society (New Perspectives, page 1).

Despite the considerable progress of the Millennium Development Goals, there remain major questions over the current framework’s ability to reach those who most need help. In the opening chapter of ‘New Perspectives’, Alberto Minujin discusses why child poverty should be measured separately from adult poverty.  He argues that the standardized monetary approach to identifying and gauging poverty should be replaced by multidisciplinary methods to provide a more accurate picture of the specific detriments that face disadvantaged children.

A strong example of why the monetary approach is limited can be seen in the widespread malnutrition currently affecting Indian children. While India has experienced exponential growth over the last decade, there has been little progress made in improving nutrition. Stunting rates have remained high and almost half of children under five are malnourished, a statistic that the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has decried as a “national shame.” (EFA, 43)

Minujin focuses the bulk of his chapter on identifying new and progressive methods of defining and measuring child destitution, from the Bristol deprivation model which not only aims to quantify the extent of child poverty but also the depth of child poverty to the Young Lives project which seeks to understand its causes and consequences. It is his opinion that by combing different methods, policy makers and organisations will be able to apply a multifocal approach to tackling inequalities. Arguably, only by shifting attention to those who have not benefited from the MDG program will its aims be fully achieved. As one contributor in our online discussion stated,

‘Let us please keep in mind those that are so easily falling through the cracks…the main thing we can do in a next round of goals is to concentrate on the most vulnerable.’

The Wikiprogress online consultation closes this  Friday 15 March. You can post a comment in a few clicks by going to the “Contribute!” section of the online consultation page. Make sure your voice is heard. 

Robbie Lawrence

Wikichild Coordinator 
@Wiki_child

The voices of young women. Do you hear them?

As a part of the Wikiprogress on Gender Equality series, this progblog on empowering girls and young women is brought to you by Robbie Lawrence, Wikichild Coordinator. 

City Dump in Siem Reap - Courtesy of 10x10 

If you read our Spotlight! Gender Equality and Well-being posted last Friday you would have watched the trailer for ‘Girl Rising’, the feature film made by social action campaigners 10x10 which tells the story of nine girls from nine different walks of life, all seeking self empowerment through education.  The 10x10 team has set out to create a new form of social-issue moviemaking by combining production and advocacy right from the outset of the project’s fruition. The campaign, which brings together the intimacy and emotional thrust of its film with photos, videos, blogs and tweets is an exemplar of the dynamic methods in which organisations today seek to engage their audience. It also represents a ripple in a rapidly growing wave of protests around the world against the social, economic and political inequalities suffered by girls and young women. A wave that is likely to crash down on the impending Post 2015 agenda.

It was, perhaps, the attempt of a heavily male dominated institution to silence the voice of a young Pakistani girl that brought the issue of girl’s rights to the forefront of the Post 2015 discussion. When Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen as she returned home from school she immediately became an icon for voiceless and oppressed girls globally. By expressing her right to an education, Malala almost lost her life, but her attacker’s brutal actions only served to amplify her demands for equity in a transcendently male controlled world.  

Following the attempt on her life, UN Special Envoy for Global Education and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched a UN petition in Malala’s name demanding that children from every continent be in school by 2016 and last week hundreds of thousands of people mobilized to strike and dance for the One Billion Rising campaign in a bid to make her dream become a reality. When the Commission on the Status of Women convenes in New York next month, the weight of the ‘I am Malala’ campaign will undoubtedly weight heavily on the shoulders of the committee.

As the months leading up to the 2015 slip away, activists in favor of empowering girls and young women will hope that the fires ignited by the likes of ‘Girl Rising’ and ‘Malala’s Dream’ will not have cooled. In her recent article, ‘Young People and Inequalities: Recommendations for the post-2015 Development Agenda’, Sara Gold emphasizes the importance of forums like the UN’s ‘Global Online Conversation’, as it provides a platform for people to share their vision of a gender equal world.

We at Wikigender and Wikichild also plan on adding our voice to the global conversation on empowering young women, or should we say, your voice. In line with past online discussions, including this month’s ‘Transforming social norms to prevent violence against women and girls’, Wikigender and Wikichild will collaborate to host a forum on adolescent girls and social norms, which will include featured topics such as early marriage, missing women and female genital mutilation. By implementing a recognized location where information can be freely exchanged on topics like gender equality, it is our hope that over time, policy makers will use the reports formed from these discussions as points of reference. As Estelle pointed out in yesterday’s blog Rising against sexual violence! Wikigender will present the findings from their latest discussion at the 57^th CSW on the 4^th of March. 

Join us for our next online discussion in May on adolescent girls and the social norms getting in the way of their progress. We value your views and will keep you posted.

Robbie Lawrence 

Wikichild Coordinator

@Wiki_child, @Wikiprogress, @Wikigender

Post-2015: Aim here

You’d be pretty foolish to propose a complete post-2015 development framework right now, wouldn’t you? What with the High Level Panel still to have their second substantive meeting (in Monrovia, following London last November and with the Indonesian fixture to follow), and the global consultations still running… You’d pretty much be putting up a target and inviting attack, wouldn’t you? Still, hard hats on, here goes!

Save the Children today publishes the modestly titled Ending Poverty in our Generation, which sets out a vision of how the successor to the Millennium Development Goals could look. Rather than try to summarise it here, I’ll suggest reading it instead – but you can get the gist of it from the contents page, which is reproduced at the bottom of this post. And Mark Tran at the Guardian has a very good (and kind!) piece up already.

The central points, to my mind at least, are these:

• to continue the MDG structure of a limited number of goals with specific targets and indicators;
• to address inequalities in various dimensions across every thematic area;
• to prioritise the achievement of universal (or ‘zero’) goals, from e.g. universal healthcare to the eradication of hunger and absolute income poverty;
• to ensure sustainability of development progress is given much greater priority; and
• to radically improve accountability, including through prioritisation of domestic taxation as the source of finance, and with substantial investment in the availability of data

You could summarise this as ‘MDGs+ with our priorities rather than yours’, but I hope you won’t. The intention is not to make the case for this specific proposed framework, and we won’t be lobbying for this as a complete set against any other alternative.

Instead, we’re publishing this because we hope it can be useful, in two particular ways.

The first reflects that we’ve been a little worried about the need to bring the conversation on post-2015 around to specifics. For example, there is in the technical discussions, and increasingly in the political ones also, what feels like an overwhelming consensus on inequality. However, it’s much easier to have a consensus on the importance of an abstract concept than on the actual policy implications thereof. Does that consensus translate, for example, into support for a global goal on income inequality? Or for targets on the ratio of progress between the most and least favoured groups (say by gender, or ethnolinguistic group) in each and every goal? While we recognise there is a long way to go, and that many voices are still to be heard, we hope that putting up a specific proposal may help crystallise some views – even if it’s in fierce opposition to our suggestions!

The second way in which we hope this might be useful is from our own learning. Save The Children is a large and complex organisation, and the process of engaging all the internal stakeholders to reach agreement has been an eye-opening one.  We had (repeatedly!) the kinds of discussions you might expect about how progressive or conservative a position to take in particular areas, and about how much we should be setting a utopian goal, or a politically feasible one. We also had surprisingly creative and good-tempered discussions about the importance of different thematic areas, and how some could be combined rather than excluded, and on where draconian decisions were really needed in order to maintain the clarity and simplicity of the MDG structure.

Of course, that last point  is one that took a good deal of discussion: just how much should we see the MDGs’ simplicity and clarity as an ideal, or at least as necessary to their political traction? You might well take a different view, which could lead to a quiet different structure (or indeed to the absence of one; I confess I’m still attracted to the idea of much broader, and non-exclusive menus of targets and indicators from which nationally-representative processes could prioritise…).

There’s a long way to go. As the UN consultations begin to report back (you can comment on the inequalities draft report here – please do!), and the High Level Panel will start to crystallise some of their thinking, there is still prolonged technical and then political discussion to be had – not least bringing together more completely the thinking and the talking on post-2015 and Sustainable Development Goals.

With a bit of luck, Ending Poverty in our Generation can be of some use in moving these discussions along. Even if it’s just as a target for criticism. Please do share your responses with us, whether in comments below or directly etc. In the end it’s only useful if we learn more publishing it about where post-2015 is going.

Introduction

Building on the strengths of the MDGs

Finishing the job

Addressing the MDGs’ limitations

Responding to changes and new challenges

1) Finishing the job: better outcomes, faster progress

1 Reducing inequalities

2 Increasing transparency and accountability

3 Synergies and systems

4 Ensuring access is not at the expense of outcomes

5 Environmental sustainability

2) Putting in place the foundations of human development

Goal 1: By 2030 we will eradicate extreme poverty and reduce relative poverty through inclusive growth and decent work

Goal 2: By 2030 we will eradicate hunger, halve stunting, and ensure universal access to sustainable food, water and sanitation

Goal 3: By 2030 we will end preventable child and maternal mortality and provide healthcare for all

Goal 4: By 2030 we will ensure all children receive a good-quality education and have good learning outcomes

Goal 5: By 2030 we will ensure all children live a life free from all forms of violence, are protected in conflict and thrive in a safe family environment

Goal 6: By 2030 governance will be more open, accountable and inclusive

  

3) Creating supportive and sustainable environments

Goal 7: By 2030 we will have robust global partnerships for more and effective use of financial resources

Goal 8: By 2030 we will build disaster-resilient societies

Goal 9: By 2030 we will have a sustainable, healthy and resilient environment for all

Goal 10: By 2030 we will deliver sustainable energy to all

4) Institutional support and enabling mechanisms

Financing and policy coherence for development

Accountability

Data availability

5) Save the Children’s proposal for a post-2015 framework

 Alex Cobham, Uncounted Blog
This blog is about inequality and development and those who are uncounted. It is written and maintained by Alex Cobham, Save the Children's Head of Research. Uncounted aims to stimulate debate but is not a reflection of official Save the Children policy


Ending Poverty in Our Generation is Wikichild's most recent Spotlight.