Understanding and addressing child poverty

1. Understanding and addressing child poverty ERF-UNICEF Workshop on Socio-Economic Policies for ensuring child rights and equity Bangkok 13-17 June 2011

2. Some conceptual issues • Does how you measure poverty matter? • Analysing trends over time • Defining particular poverty reduction strategies • Identifying poor areas/regions/pockets/groups • Targeting public services and programmes • Why is the money income approach so persistent? • Governments are more used to it and it is easy to measure because of income/expenditure surveys • Provides data comparable across time (or does it?)

3. Income approach to poverty • World Bank’s poverty line: • First, an international poverty line (IPL) is defined which is deemed equivalent in purchasing power to the US$ in a specific base year. • This IPL is then translated into the local currency units of different countries. • The IPL is again translated temporally into some number of units of each local currency in the assessment year. • The World Bank has defined three IPLs so far: • $1 per day per person in 1985 • $1.08 per day per person in 2000-01 • $1.25 per day per person in 2005

4. Problems with PPP • Choosing comparable baskets of goods • Assuming invariant basket • Poor quality of the data (lack of price surveys) • Goods and services are available more cheaply in countries with low wages, so this makes poverty a “virtue” by adding to purchasing power of income. • Not relevant for trade comparisons.

7. Problems with income approach • Results vary according to the line chosen, how the data are collected, and so on. • Focus on household income, so vulnerable categories (women, children, old, disabled etc) are not recognised for their special needs. • Makes a sharp dichotomy between “poor” and “non-poor”. • Does not recognise transient poverty and vulnerability to shocks. • Does not recognise that poverty is multidimensional.

9. Why is child poverty different? • Children are more vulnerable to deprivation because of age and dependency. • The consequences of poverty may not be permanent in adults but the consequences of not having basic needs fulfilled could be permanent in children. • Children are impacted differently by development policies. • The same challenges faced by children and adults might require different solutions.

10. Bristol approach to child poverty • Shelter: Children living in a dwelling with five or more people per room or with no floor material. • Sanitation facilities: Children with no access to a toilet facility of any kind. • Safe drinking water: Children using surface water such as rivers, ponds, streams and dams, or who take 30 minutes or longer to collect water. • Information: Children (above 2 years old) with no access to a radio or television or telephone or newspaper or computer. • Food and nutrition: Children who are more than three standard deviations below the international average for stunting (height for age) or wasting (height for weight) or underweight (weight for age). • Education: Children (above 6 years old) of schooling age who have never been to school or who are not currently attending school. • Health: Children who did not receive immunization against any diseases or who did not receive treatment for a recent illness involving an acute respiratory infection or diarrhoea.

11. UNICEF’s Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities • Considers both income and non-income factors of the caregivers or the household, and how these determine whether or not a child enjoys her/his right to survive, grow and develop • how resource scarcity and deprivations directly impact children, and how they are experienced differently according to gender, age and social status at the family, household or country level; • childhood as a space that is separate from adulthood (life cycle approach); • family care and protection enable girls and boys to enjoy other basic rights such that children who are deprived of a safe and caring environment are also more likely to experience other deprivations.

13. Using this new approach, significantly more children are identified as poor in countries where the study has been undertaken, compared to the approach that relies on monetary measures of poverty. • Shelter and sanitation deprivation were the most frequently occurring combination of severe deprivations in the developing world.

14. Multidimensional Poverty Index • Education (each indicator is weighted at 1/6 ) • Years of Schooling: deprived if no household member has completed five years of schooling • Child Enrolment: deprived if child is not attending school in years 1 to 8 • Health (each indicator is weighted at 1/6) • Child Mortality: deprived if any child has died in the family • Nutrition: deprived if any adult or child for whom there is nutritional information is malnourished • Standard of Living (each indicator is weighted at 1/18) • Electricity: deprived if the household has no electricity • Drinking water: deprived if the household does not have access to clean drinking water or clean water is more than 30 minutes walk from home • Sanitation: deprived if they do not have an improved toilet or if their toilet is shared • Flooring: deprived if the household has dirt, sand or dung floor • Cooking Fuel: deprived if they cook with wood, charcoal or dung Assets: deprived if the household does not own more than one of: radio, TV, telephone, bike, or motorbike, and do not own a car or tractor

15. Problems of data collection • Trade off between costs of surveys and information gained. • Use of demographic and health indicators. • MICS and Poverty mapping. • Capturing transient poverty. • Which indicators to use as the most basic?

16. Strategies for reduction of child poverty • Employment of adults in household • Food and nutrition • Health services and sanitation • Access to good quality education • Cash transfers: useful but need to be additions to, not substitutes for public provision • Structural changes versus palliatives, and momentum generated by small measures • How should these be prioritised?

17. Targeting social provision • Conceptual and practical difficulties of identifying the poor • Administrative costs of identifying poor and implementing programmes only for them • Errors: Type I (unfair exclusion) and Type II (unjustified inclusion) • Lack of recognition of dynamics of vulnerability • Reduced political voice for programme