Innocenti Working Papers

Accumulated evidence from dozens of cash transfer programmes across the world suggest that there are few interventions that can match the range of impacts and cost-effectiveness of a small, predictable monetary transfer to poor families in developing countries. These results lead many policymakers to consider cash transfer programmes the ‘gold-standard’ in anti-poverty policy with some even advocating for benchmarking all development interventions against what would have been accomplished with a direct cash transfer. However, the benchmarking argument rests on the accumulated evidence from many programmes that highlights the range of potential benefits of cash transfers, while each individual study typically focused on only one programme and one outcome. This article is the first to provide comprehensive impact results of an unconditional cash transfer from one programme, covering many outcomes in poverty, social and economic domains. We implement an experimental design to evaluate the Zambian Government’s Child Grant, an unconditional cash transfer to families with small children in three of the poorest districts of Zambia. We document the broad impacts of the programme, including on consumption, livelihood strengthening, material welfare of children, young child feeding, investment in assets, productive activities and housing after two years, making this one of the first studies to demonstrate both protective and productive impacts of a national unconditional cash transfer programme. However impacts in areas such as child nutritional status and schooling depend on initial conditions of the household, suggesting that cash alone is not enough to solve all constraints faced by these poor, rural households. Even an unconditional cash transfer programme with a wide range of impacts does not produce effects for all outcomes, suggesting that complementary programmes to achieve specific outcomes will still be necessary even in the most successful cases.

During the late 2000s, European countries were affected by an economic crisis considered the most severe since the Second World War. Although the nature of the shock and its evolution were different across countries, the reactions of governments were quite similar. Indeed, governments implemented stimulus fiscal packages in the early stages of the crisis; nonetheless, the worsening of economic conditions plus the pressures coming from financial markets pushed them into a process of fiscal consolidation. This paper shows that these different policy reactions provoked important consequences for people’s living standards. If the increase in social transfers and the reduction of the tax burden partially compensated the drop in private income over the period 2008-2010, the implementation of the austerity packages amplified the negative consequences of the economic recessions. Moreover, the policies implemented by governments during the austerity period deepened inequality. In some countries – such as Estonia, Greece and Spain - the burden of the adjustment fell on the bottom of the distribution producing a deterioration of living conditions for the most vulnerable. Lastly, government interventions worsened the conditions of the poorest children in countries such as France and Hungary.

This initial exploratory study examines the governance and finance of ECS in three countries using an in-depth qualitative approach. The methodologies and tools provide an innovative strategy built upon the literature of governance and finance to understand how to improve access, quality and equity of ECS. Cross-country analyses reveal key emerging trends in ECD systems governance at different levels and around crucial dimensions, including actors, coordination, policy architectures, and local-level perspectives. The findings of this study have implications for strengthening systems of global ECD systems research.

Hungary and Iceland were among the countries most affected by the recent macroeconomic shock. Although they suffered a similar GDP drop and started from much the same fiscal conditions, their respective governments decided to follow different strategies of adjustment. Each country cut public spending according to different priorities. However, the most important differences are related to the revenue side. While the Hungarian government implemented a flat tax reform, the Icelandic government replaced the previous flat tax system with a progressive one increasing the participation in the fiscal consolidation process for high income groups. These two opposite adjustment strategies produced different economic and social outcomes. In both countries, the primary balance turned positive and the level of debt on GDP started to decrease. Nonetheless, while Iceland fully met the objectives of the IMF programme, the worsening of economic conditions forced the Hungarian government to ask for additional help from the EU and the IMF in 2012. In terms of distribution, social transfers contributed to reduce inequality in both countries, while the different tax strategies operated in opposite ways. Indeed, the results show that the Hungarian tax system became more regressive while the 2010 Iceland’s Tax Reform contributed to reduce inequality by nearly two points.

The risk and time preferences of individuals as well as their subjective expectations regarding the future are likely to play an important role in choice behaviour. Measurement of these individual characteristics in large-scale surveys has been a recent development and empirical evidence on their associations with behaviour remains limited. We summarize the results of measuring individuals’ attitudes towards inter-temporal choice, risk, and the future in a large-scale field survey in Kenya. We also examine the impact of a cash transfer programme on these preferences and expectations. We find very low rates of inconsistency in interpreting questions on time and risk preferences. Cash transfers alone do not appear to impact time discounting or risk aversion, but they do have an important impact on subjective well-being measures and on future perceptions of quality of life. These in turn may affect forward-looking decisions such as financial and human capital investment, although this is not explored in this paper and remains part of the future research agenda.

The Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis for the European Union (EU-MODA) compares the material well-being of children across the EU member states, using data from the child material deprivation module of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2009. Embedded in the multidimensional poverty measurement literature, EU-MODA applies internationally accepted standards for the construction of indicators and dimensions of child well-being. The analysis ranges from indicator and dimension headcounts, overlaps between several dimensions, decomposition of the adjusted multidimensional deprivation headcounts, to overlaps between monetary poverty and multidimensional deprivation. This technical note describes the EU-MODA methodology in detail.

Children living in urban slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh, often have poor access to school and attend different types of school than students from middle class households. This paper asks whether their experiences in school also disadvantage them further in terms of their learning outcomes and the likelihood of dropping out. It is based on interviews with 36 students aged 11-16 from both slum and middle-class backgrounds, in 2012. Most of the participants were in private schools, and learning was overwhelmingly geared towards assessment and the memorisation of set content. Though teachers were sometimes hard-working in preparing their students for examinations, ultimate responsibility fell to the students. Ranking and labelling of students kept their examination performance salient at all times. Teacher-student relationships varied from the supportive to the abusive. Beating and humiliating punishment were common in all types of school, despite a recent legal ban on the former. Lessons were sometimes dry, irrelevant to students’ lives, and with little scope for active student engagement. A new emphasis on ‘creative learning’ in curricula and teacher training had, at the time of the study, yet to filter into the classroom. Students were subject to the risk of violence both outside and inside the school, whatever their background. However, it was much easier for middle class students to change school when they ran into problems, or to employ private tutors if they needed more help with their lessons. Their way of talking about school reflected a strong sense of inevitability that they would at least complete secondary education, whereas students from slums were limited to one or two local options and even there, their places in the classroom were precarious. The paper discusses how these experiences in school are likely to heighten the risk of dropping out for slum students, analyses the results in terms of de-facto privatization and school accountability, and recommends better regulation of private tuition, and teaching styles that are less obsessed with examination results.

The impacts of the recent food, fuel and financial (3F) crises on children’s rights and well-being are being widely documented. However, from a child rights and well-being perspective little regard has so far been given to a particular socio-economic trend that has been indirectly intensified by this three-fold crisis: the proliferation of what are collectively known as ‘commercial pressures on land’ (CPLs). CPLs essentially refer to large-scale investments in land taking part in large parts of the ‘Global South’, led by multiple structural drivers, and undertaken by a variety of public, private and hybrid actors, both domestic and foreign, operating in diverse sectors. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature on the political economy of CPLs with the specific intention of mapping the relevant channels of impact on the rights and well-being of children living in rural areas where CPLs are fast-proliferating. Although there are some documented benefits, according to the large majority of the literature reviewed, the twin outcomes of displacement and dispossession are found to be critical negative socio-economic changes resulting from CPLs. In conjunction with a pervasive lack of transparency in the land transfer negotiation and implementation processes, the twin outcomes are in turn associated with a number of transmission channels that can impact the rights and well-being of children in affected rural communities, which mainly consist of: loss of access to land and other essential natural resources such as water; increased risk of insecurity of tenure; loss of livelihoods and sources of income; forced evictions; increased exposure to social conflicts and intra-household tensions; and lack of voice. The review also highlights the importance of bridging and rationalising current data on the scale and impact of CPLs on affected communities, which at the moment tends to be polarised between aggregate level data and those collected at localized levels primarily through small-scale case studies. In the absence of extensive child-centred analyses of the impacts of current manifestations of CPLs, the paper calls for further empirical studies which identify and assess, through a child rights and well-being perspective, the particular ‘structure-agency’ conditions under which reported benefits and negative impacts of CPLs take place, in order to address policy response gaps.

Social protection is particularly important for children, in view of their higher levels of vulnerability compared to adults, and the role that social protection can play in ensuring adequate nutrition, access to and utilization of social services. While existing evidence shows that social protection programmes successfully address several dimensions of child well-being – often in an indirect way – a move towards a more “child sensitive” approach to social protection has recently been advocated at the highest level in the international development community. Until now, however, the efforts that have been made to analyse the evidence regarding how social protection affects children have been based on wider analyses of the overall impact of social protection on different groups of recipients, or on analyses based on specific outcomes. This paper explores this issue in more detail. Based on an extensive analysis of the existing evidence on the impact of social protection programmes in the developing world, the paper aims to assess what are the channels that have to be taken into account to understand how the benefits of social protection could be maximized with specific regard to the different dimensions of children’s well-being.

Together with the Innocenti Working paper on relative income poverty of children in rich countries (Bradshaw et al, 2012), this paper on multidimensional child poverty and child deprivation forms the background studies on which the Innocenti Report Card 10 is based (Measuring Child Poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world‟s rich countries). The paper focuses on child deprivation in Europe and studies the degree to which it is experienced by children in 29 countries using a child specific deprivation scale. The paper discusses the construction of a child deprivation scale and estimates a European Child Deprivation Index for the 29 countries using 14 specific child related variables made available by the child module of the EU-SILC 2009 survey. The 29 countries are ranked according to the degree of child deprivation: the results show considerable differences between the countries. The (non-)overlap between child deprivation and child monetary poverty is considerable but limited. In general the results indicate where policy interventions can produce improvements.

This paper presents and discusses child relative income poverty statistics for 35 economically advanced countries, representing all the members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States. As most of the data refer to the year 2008, the results partly reflect the initial impact of the global economic crisis as well as government responses. According to the data, Nordic countries and the Netherlands present the lowest child relative poverty levels, while Japan, the United States, most of the Southern European countries and some of the new EU member states have among the highest. Several factors are associated with the risk of poverty, such as demographic composition, educational level of household members, labour conditions, but the extent to which these factors influence the risk of poverty vary considerably across countries. Lastly, in several countries the role of government is found to be highly important in reducing child poverty.

Since the end of 2007, countries in Central Asia have been struck by two major consecutive shocks: the food and fuel price increase in 2007-08, and the global economic and financial crisis that began at the end of 2008. Households, both poor and not poor, are directly and adversely affected by the crisis. The multi-dimensionality of the crises and the volatile economic environment challenge the ability of vulnerable households to cope and to maintain their living standards. Social protection programmes play an important role in the response to a crisis. This paper provides an overview of the social and economic vulnerabilities of households with children in the five Central Asian countries, and assesses the ability of national social protection systems to address these, with the main focus on the role of non-contributory cash transfers financed from general government revenues. The paper concludes that the existing social cash transfer systems are not effective in addressing the needs of poor and vulnerable children and families in Central Asia. Limited coverage together with limited funding reduces the potential poverty reduction impact of the programmes. The paper discusses potential strategies for improving existing systems by consolidating and protecting government spending, streamlining existing benefits and transfers, improving the identification of beneficiaries and strengthening administration, monitoring and evaluation systems.

The European Union is developing child specific indicators of well-being to complement the Laeken indicators on poverty and social exclusion. Though many child sensitive indicators have been proposed, none of the measures is sensitive to (changes in) cumulative deprivation, i.e. the degree to which a child simultaneously experiences a range of unfavourable conditions. This paper describes and empirically tests a number of candidate measures of cumulative deprivation to monitor child well-being. The ideal measure is sensitive to (changes in) cumulative deprivation and, given its broad use in the policy community, has an intuitive interpretation. Using the 2007 wave of the EU-SILC data, we construct several headcount and adjusted-headcount measures of cumulative deprivation from a set of 13 deprivation indicators for Germany, France, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. We test the impact of changes in the main methodological decisions: the exclusion of deprivation indicators, changes in the indicator threshold, changes in the cumulative deprivation threshold and changes in the weighting indicators. Our findings indicate that some measures are considerably more sensitive than others. In the context of the search for child-specific indicators, we conclude that headcount and adjusted headcount measures of cumulative deprivation give relevant and complementary insights into child well-being and perform well in sensitivity tests. While the interpretation of headcount measures is somewhat easier, the adjusted-headcount is additionally able to monitor changes in cumulative deprivation and it is less sensitive to changes in the methodology. Within these two broad classes some non-trivial choices must be made and the adjusted-headcount with a cumulative deprivation threshold of one satisfies the evaluation criteria best. The relative measures of cumulative deprivation are problematic: not only are they very sensitive to changes in methodological decisions, but they are also more difficult to interpret. However, to monitor cumulative deprivation of children there is also a need for child specific indicators (rather than household level indicators) over a wider range of well-being domains.

The paper analyzes the causes of the decline of the under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) in sub-Saharan Africa over the years 1995-2007 by estimating an aggregate econometric model for a panel of 40 countries. This model is then used to compute the impact of the 2008-09 global economic crisis on child mortality, by comparing the number of child deaths which would have occurred under a „no-crisis counterfactual scenario‟ with those computed under the actual „crisis scenario‟. The results suggest that in sub-Saharan Africa the economic slowdown – and in some countries the negative economic growth – generated by the global crisis caused an additional 27000 child deaths. However, if changes occurring during 2008-09 in other determinants of U5MR are factored in, the number of child deaths declined by 15000 units in relation to the counterfactual scenario. A protective effect on U5MR was played by the surge in food production and the increase of public expenditure and foreign aid to health. The countries most negatively affected by the impact of the crisis were the Sudano-Sahelian and Eastern African ones, while Coastal West Africa and Southern Africa generally experienced a steady decline in child deaths. Starting from the U5MR estimates for 2009, the model is also used to assess what values the determinants of U5MR should take over 2009-2015 in order for the countries of the region to meet the MDG4 target as closely as possible. Finally the paper analyzes the determinants of U5MR inequality by wealth quintiles by making use of both aggregate and DHS data on access to services, family characteristics, income per capita, and other variables.

This paper examines the role of civil society in the process of implementing the general measures of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, as defined in article 4 of the Convention and its General Comment No.5 (2003). While it is established in international law that States parties are the primary duty bearers to promote and protect children‟s rights, the Committee on the Rights of the Child has also recognized that other actors, including children, have a right and need to be engaged in this process. An examination of the variety of definitions provided of „civil society‟ reveals that it includes, inter alia, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community groups, women's groups, environmental movements, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations and advocacy groups. Drawing on the author‟s experience in civil society organisations and her membership on the Committee on the Rights of the Child (2003-2009), the findings show that civil society plays an important role in the implementation of the CRC, and that NGOs, in particular, play a vital role. NGOs operate in different legal, economic, social and political settings, which results in varied modalities of work and impacts. The paper draws attention to the wide issues and challenges affecting civil society today, including financial crises, poverty, globalization, and varying levels of political commitment. Based on the examples provided, many of which draw on the concluding observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and case studies of civil society activities, the paper lists recommendations for follow-up by key actors. In so doing, this paper seeks to provide concrete recommendations to government, the Committee, and actors at national, regional and international level.

This working paper provides an overview of the transitional process in Colombia and Peru, focusing on the situation of children. The adoption of judicial and administrative measures to deal with human rights violations from the past (Peru) and the present (Colombia) is a tool towards the consolidation of democratic institutions. While individual initiatives have been undertaken in both countries, addressing the situation of children in an integrated, comprehensive way is a persistent challenge, as is the exploration of legal tools as a means to demand responsibility.

This paper reviews and analyses psychosocial support as an essential tool for protection of the rights of children participating in transitional justice mechanisms. Strategies for offering psychosocial support to children involved in transitional justice mechanisms can cover a wide range of interventions. Experiences show that the availability of psychosocial support in combination with effective protection strategies allow children to participate safely, improve the quality of their testimony and protect them against potential harm caused by their participation. The paper first looks at psychosocial factors that affect children‟s participation in transitional justice mechanisms. These factors largely determine children‟s need for protection and support and can reflect children‟s responses to their involvement in transitional justice processes. A distinction has to be made between psychosocial factors related to the child and his or her experiences during the conflict on the one side, and factors determined by the type of transitional mechanism on the other. Children‟s participation in transitional justice processes is influenced significantly by their personal experiences during the conflict; cognitive, social and emotional development; coping skills and social support. These factors influence children‟s capacity to give an accurate statement, cope with the stress of testifying, be confronted with the accused and deal with cross-examination. These have important implications for the choice of support strategies. While all children are affected by armed conflict, some are particularly vulnerable, including children who were direct victims of violence, children associated with armed forces or groups, victims of sexual violence or those who have very limited support in the current situation. The nature of the transitional justice mechanism determines children‟s role in the process, in terms of whether they give a statement, testify in court, participate in a hearing, make a submission or are cross-examined. These characteristics also influence the consequences of children‟s involvement, including possible threats to which they will be exposed. In judicial mechanisms such as international or hybrid tribunals, witnesses are mainly considered providers of evidence, and their involvement is very much shaped by strict rules of procedure and evidence. The adversarial system, common in many of these mechanisms, also puts a heavy burden on witnesses, particularly children. At the same time, international or hybrid tribunals usually have significantly more resources to set up support mechanisms and to establish protective measures for witnesses. Non-judicial mechanisms, in particular truth commissions, can tailor their procedures more easily to meet the needs and capacities of children. Children‟s participation can also take different forms and include innovative forms such as special hearings or submissions by children‟s groups. In addition, the absence of punitive elements and an adversarial process reduces the burden on witnesses and the potential threat against them. However, these mechanisms often lack the resources and mandate to ensure support and protection for children who participate. Second, this paper summarizes the legal framework guiding psychosocial support and protection of children in justice, truth and reconciliation processes. The Convention on the Rights of the Child forms the backbone of the legal framework for the protection and support of children in transitional justice mechanisms. Other instruments relevant for child victims and witnesses include the 1985 Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, which outlines benchmarks for the protection of victims of crime, and the UN Guidelines on Justice in Matters involving Child Victims and Witnesses. Further, this paper analyses the strengths and weaknesses of past and current policies and procedures regulating the psychosocial support of children. Throughout the short history of transitional justice mechanisms psychosocial support for witnesses has developed in response to the growing involvement of child victims. The Special Court for Sierra Leone, the International Criminal Court and the truth commissions in Sierra Leone and in Liberia have put in place a variety of measures to protect the rights of child victims and witnesses participating in procedures. The following measures are discussed in the article: Integration of provisions for protection and support into the regulatory framework of transitional justice mechanisms; Selection of specialized staff and adequate training of all staff on issues related to dealing with child witnesses; Vulnerability assessment of potential child witnesses; Individual support and counselling before, during and after testimony; Establishment of protective measures before, during and after testimony; Long-term support and referral; Involvement of the community in support strategies and the use of local approaches to healing. Based on these experiences, a number of challenges are presented related to the involvement of children in transitional justice mechanisms, including the need to balance the right to participation and the right to protection. The paper looks as well at the discrepancy between the resources made available for different justice mechanisms and the possibilities for child participation that they can offer. Also discussed is the necessity to manage expectations of victims and witnesses involved in transitional justice mechanisms. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations for enhancing the protection of children in transitional justice mechanisms.

The last several decades have witnessed a dramatic change in the methods of warfare. Civilians are now increasingly targets of violence, not just mere victims of collateral damage. Among civilians targeted, children and youth are subject to acts of violence, including enforced disappearances and enforced conscription. Children have been forcibly disappeared and forcibly conscripted in many countries including Argentina, El Salvador and northern Uganda. This paper focuses on the use or potential use of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or genetic testing to identify disappeared children (otherwise referred to as genetic tracing) in Argentina, El Salvador and northern Uganda and on how this evidence may be used to achieve justice. Identification of the disappeared, family reunification, support for the disappeared and redress for families of the disappeared have been identified as crucial to achieving justice in the wake of mass atrocities.1 Genetic tracing has proved to be an exceptionally powerful tool to identify disappeared children, facilitate family reunification and seek accountability in countries such as Argentina and El Salvador. It could likewise play a crucial role in regions such as northern Uganda that are on the verge of emerging from armed conflict and will face similar post-conflict challenges.

This paper examines truth and reconciliation commissions that have made reference to a longer-term role for education in coming to terms with the past and contributing towards future reconciliation. The countries reviewed are Guatemala, Liberia, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Timor-Leste. Some have developed strategies for children‟s participation and made recommendations for inclusion in the formal school curriculum. However, recommendations regarding a role for education have usually been very general in nature, with little specification of what is expected of educators in practical terms and little follow-through by education authorities. The paper therefore identifies a number of challenges if education is to have a role in truth and reconciliation. It also identifies potential areas for educational development and recommendations for future actions.

This paper is among the first to analyse children‟s experiences of reparations programmes, taking into consideration programmes from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The violence, abuse and hardship that girls and boys suffer during armed conflict and political violence under authoritarian and dictatorial regimes continues to severely affect their development long after the end of war or demise of the violent regime. They experience violations of their civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights, including the rights to life, freedom of movement and association, education, health and family, which embraces the right to knowing and being cared for by their parents. Their rights to development and to a safe and healthy environment are also violated. It is not possible to fully repair children who have experienced such harms. Nonetheless, girls and boys have a right to remedy and reparation under international law – to benefit from reparation in material, symbolic, individual and collective forms. This working paper draws from reparation as conceived in the United Nations Resolution on Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law (2005). It offers a concise overview of trends in reparation programmes set up to address situations of armed conflict and under authoritarian and dictatorial regimes where children are subjected to systematic forms of grave violence. The authors demonstrate the failure to name and address grave rights violations against children in www.unicef-irc.org. past reparations programmes and efforts, much to the detriment of surviving children. The authors argue that at the heart of much of the violence against children in situations of armed conflict is the terrible damage done to relationships and social fabric among individuals, communities, societies and cultures. Recognizing the need to address the healing of relationships and reweaving of social fabric, in part through reparation, the paper offers suggestions for reparation approaches that could lead to better informing and shaping reparation responses for child victims.

Like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana is experiencing the impact of the global crisis and the uncertain economic outlook. Indeed, as Ghana’s economy is among the most open in Africa, it is expected that the country has been and will continue to be severely affected by the crisis, although strong export prices of its main exports (gold and cocoa) may at least partially counteract the effects associated with the crisis. The main goal of this paper is to understand the potential impacts of the 2008/9 global crisis on different dimensions of child poverty (monetary, hunger, school participation, child labour and access to health services) in Ghana and to support the policy-maker in designing the most appropriate policy response to counteract the negative effects of the crisis. As timely data are not available, a combined macro-micro economic model to predict the impact of the global crisis on children was developed. Simulations suggest that the financial crisis would increase monetary poverty and hunger across all regions of Ghana, eroding many of the gains made over the past few years. Indeed, in comparison with the year preceding the crisis, instead of a reduction of four percentage points in child monetary poverty in 2011 predicted in the absence of crisis, the simulations indicate a 6.6 percentage point increase, with a continuous increasing pattern over the period of study. The global crisis is also predicted to severely deepen hunger among children, which is simulated to increase up to 6.6 percentage points in 2011 beginning with a sharp increase already in 2009. For both monetary poverty and hunger, the impact of the crisis differs across all regions, with the Eastern, Volta and Greater Accra regions predicted to be the most affected. Children’s participation in schooling and labour, as well as their access to health services, are forecast to be much less affected by the crisis, although it is found to reverse predicted increases in enrolment and health access (with substitution toward more modern types of health services) and forecasted reductions in child labour. Finally, alternative policy options have been simulated: a cash transfer programme targeted to poor children is found to be generally more effective in protecting children than food subsidies. Indeed, with a total budget equivalent to 1% of 2008 GDP, a cash transfer – equivalent to an individual annual amount of 19.8 Cedis – would cut the predicted increase in monetary poverty by over two percentage points in 2011. Although Ghana might be in a position to rapidly implement a cash transfer programme building on the existing Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty (LEAP) programme, other interventions (or mix of policies) might be more cost-effective in the short run. A combination of a universal or regionally targeted cash transfer programmes for children aged 0 to 5 years old, together with a school-feeding programme in poorer regions, might represent an effective way to intervene quickly to improve child well-being.

Burkina Faso‟s hard earned economic gains in recent years have been eroded by the 2008-09 world financial and economic crisis. The country will particularly feel the effects of the world economic crisis due to its close links with the world economy. Most of the adverse effects are transmitted to households then passed onto children. The situation of children principally depends on the monetary and non-monetary wellbeing of their household. This, together with their greater vulnerability, means that children are at risk of suffering more, and for longer, from the impacts of the crisis. It is therefore crucial to understand and anticipate the effects that the crisis may have on children in Burkina Faso and to propose options for social protection to counter these effects. To this end, we propose a macro-micro economic approach. Macro-micro economic analysis uses a general calculable equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the impacts of various transmission channels of the crisis to the Burkinabe economy. The results of these simulations are then used for the micro-econometric analysis, which integrates individual and household economic behaviour to evaluate the impact of the crisis on child welfare. According to our simulations, which run from 2009 to 2011, the financial crisis respectively leads to 5 and 1 percentage point increases in the incidence of monetary and caloric poverty among Burkinabe children. Moreover, the school enrolment rate for children will decline by about 0.7 percentage points due to the crisis, while the child labour rate will increase by about 1 percentage point. Finally, a 1 percentage point decrease in the medical consultation rate among children is expected, along with substitution from modern health services to traditional medicine. Large regional and rural vs. urban gaps are also noted. A monetary transfer policy targeting poor children appears to be the most effective at reversing the negative effects of the crisis and returning to the trend that would have existed without the crisis. Such a policy, financed by external aid and with a budget of 1% of GDP, re-establishes the trend that monetary poverty would have followed in the absence of a crisis and even leads to a reduction in hunger. It also limits the crisis‟ adverse effects on school enrolment, child labour and sick children‟s access to modern health care services. A universal (non-targeted) variant of this transfer policy for 0-5 year-olds has similar results and is easier to enact. Policies which subsidize food and cereals, as well as monetary transfer policies for the Centre and Mouhoun regions (the areas most affected by the August-September 2009 floods) were also analyzed.

The current global financial and economic crisis, which exacerbates the impacts of the energy and food crises that immediately preceded it, has spread to the developing countries endangering recent gains in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction. The effects of the crisis are likely to vary substantially between countries and between individuals within the same country. Children are among the most vulnerable population, particularly in a period of crisis. Especially in least developed countries, where social safety nets programmes are missing or performing poorly and public fiscal space is extremely limited, households with few economic opportunities are at a higher risk of falling into (monetary) poverty, suffering from hunger, removing children from school and into work, and losing access to health services. This study simulates the impacts of the global economic crisis and alternative policy responses on different dimensions of child welfare in Western and Central Africa (WCA) over the period 2009-2011. It is based on country studies for Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Ghana, which broadly represent the diversity of economic conditions in WCA countries. In order to capture the complex macro-economic effects of the crisis and the various policy responses – on trade, investment, remittances, aid flows, goods and factor markets – and to then trace their consequences in terms of child welfare – monetary poverty, hunger (caloric poverty), school participation, child labour, and access to health services – a combination of macro- and micro-analysis was adopted. The simulations suggest that the strongest effects are registered in terms of monetary poverty and hunger, although large differences between countries emerge. More moderate impacts are predicted in terms of school participation, child labour, and access to health care, although these are still significant and require urgent policy responses. Specifically, Ghana is the country where children are predicted to suffer the most in terms of monetary poverty and hunger, while Burkina Faso is where the largest deteriorations in schooling, child labour and access to health services are simulated. Among the policy responses examined to counteract the negative effects of the crisis on child wellbeing, a targeted cash transfer to predicted poor children is by far the most effective programme. A comparison between a universal and targeted approach is also presented.

This paper provides an overview of research findings, legislation, policy and programme responses to prevent and respond to the sexual abuse and exploitation of boys in South Asia. The background to the paper is based on the findings from previously conducted UNICEF IRC research on child trafficking in the region, in which it was indicated that boys enjoy less legal protection than girls from sexual abuse and exploitation and less access to service for victims. While it is seen that the majority of legislation and policies that address ‘children’ adequately address ‘boys’, this paper notes areas in which the rights and needs of boys require greater focus. Among the concerns is the absence of legal commentary on legislation regarding boys’ issues and an absence of advocacy efforts to take action and amend laws to provide equal protection to boys. In some cases legislation covers only girls and women. And, although research shows that boys face nearly the same degree of sexual abuse and exploitation as girls, programming throughout the region is overwhelmingly directed at girls and women. Evidence-based information is lacking on the sexual abuse of both boys and girls and on the sexual exploitation of boys. The majority of studies to date have emphasized trafficking for sexual exploitation and have been focused on women and girls. Research on trafficking has concentrated on recruitment, transportation and sale of victims; little research has been conducted on the subsequent situations of exploitation into which children are trafficked. Some countries in South Asia are beginning to fill the knowledge gap regarding both child sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of boys. The information that is presented was mainly gathered in 2008, but it remains limited by the sources available, some of which date back several years previously. The findings are however considered to be relatively robust and consistent. The report presents concrete recommendations for strengthening legislation, policy and programmes to address this issue from a child rights based approach. It highlights that listening to boys and girls and learning from their experiences and recommendations are key to designing and implementing effective preventive and protective mechanisms.

Since 2006, Mali has experienced the full effects of the global food crisis, with price increases of up to 67%. This study presents simulations of the impacts of this crisis and a number of policy responses with respect to the welfare of children. The impacts are analyzed in terms of monetary (food) poverty, nutrition, education, child labor and access to health services of children. According to simulations, food poverty among children would have increased from 41% to 51%, with a corresponding rise in caloric insufficiency from 32% to 40%, while the impacts on school participation, work and access to health services would have been relatively weak. To prepare an adequate response, the government should start by identifying the poor individuals who are to be protected, based on a limited number of easily observed sociodemographic characteristics. A method of targeting these individuals is proposed in this study. However, simulations show that with targeting about one quarter of poor children would be erroneously excluded (under-coverage), while more than a third of non-poor children would be erroneously included (leakage). These identification errors, which increase in proportion with the extremity of poverty, reduce the impact and increase the cost of any public interventions. That having been said, it is important to note that leakage to the non-poor can nonetheless improve the conditions of children in terms of caloric intake, school participation, child labour and access to health services, none of which are exclusive to poor children. When targeting children or sub-groups of children by age, benefits will likely be deflected to some extent to other family members. Moreover, it is total household income, regardless of the member targeted, that determines decisions relating to child work, education or access to health services. School feeding programmes are found to be a particularly efficient policy in that they concentrate public funds exclusively on the consumption of highly nutritious foods, while cash transfers can be used by households for other purposes. Moreover, school feeding programmes are likely to have desirable effects on school participation and child labour. However, there are some caveats due to the fact that these programmes exclude children who do not attend school, the difficulty of exclusively targeting poor children and the possibility that child food rations at home will be proportionally reduced.

After two decades of transition the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States face an increasingly diverse mix of old and new policy challenges to improving child well-being and realizing children‟s rights. While attempts have been made to reflect these challenges and diversities by constructing indices of child wellbeing, which measure and rank overall performance by individual countries, this paper proposes a simplified approach which examines five different dimensions of child wellbeing separately, using several indicators for each dimension which allow cross-country comparison. The dimensions included in the analysis are income, health, education, housing and deprivation of parental up-bringing. The results highlight a divergence of child well-being priorities in the selected dimensions for the different countries and for different age groups of children. The analysis shows that in the 2000-2008 period the situation of children improved in absolute terms in almost all dimensions in all countries, but that government interventions still face difficulties in reaching all children, and that across the region there are increasing differences in the character of problems facing the more vulnerable sections of the child population. The discussion shows that it is difficult to rank countries according to an overall level of child well-being, since performance varies significantly according to the choice of dimension or indicator considered. An overall index cannot therefore capture the open challenges, and indeed may distract policy attention away from them. The approach used in this paper shows that each country faces challenges which can be tackled only if they are monitored and fully understood with clear and meaningful indicators, analyzed individually and in their interaction.

There were 1.5 million documented foreigners living in Switzerland in 2000. This represented 20 per cent of the resident population, which is one of the highest shares of foreign residents within any country in Europe. Switzerland may be described as a country of immigrants because of significant inflows: of the resident population aged 15 and above, 23 per cent are foreign born. At the 2000 census, of the 1,442,000 children 0 to 17 years of age living in families in Switzerland, approximately 39 per cent (559,000) were members of families of foreign origin with at least one foreign-born parent. The countries of origin of 52 per cent of these families were outside the European Union. The 2000 census enumerated 350,000 children resident in Switzerland who were foreign citizens.

According to 2001 Census data more than 900,000 children aged 0–17, 10 per cent of all children in Italy, were born abroad or had at least one parent who was born abroad. One or both of the parents of about 500,000 children in immigrant families were born in less developed countries. Children now account for almost 23 per cent of the foreign population. In this report, we have analysed household composition and wellbeing of children in immigrant families with 2001 Italian Census data and 2006 survey data. Inclusion and other social issues are reviewed through the most recent literature.

In 2005, 4.9 million immigrants were residing in metropolitan France. This was 8.1 per cent of the population. Children of immigrants represent close to one fifth of all children. Children with at least one parent from Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia make up almost 40 per cent of these children, and children of sub-Saharan African origin make up one eighth. Of the 3.5 million foreigners living in France in 2004, 450,000 were children 0–17 whose parents were foreign born.

This paper adds a perspective to existing research on child protection by engaging in a debate on intersectional discrimination and its relationship to child protection. The paper has a twofold objective, (1) to further establish intersectionality as a concept to address discrimination against children, and (2) to illustrate the importance of addressing intersectionality within rights-based programmes of child protection. First, the paper applies the concept of intersectionality within a children‟s context. Intersectionality and intersectional discrimination are concepts used to describe the situation where multiple grounds of discrimination operate at the same time, for example when Romani girls experience harassment and abuse on the basis of their gender and ethnic origin in combination. Using the example of Romani children, the paper sheds light on the complex ways in which children are denied the equal enjoyment of their rights and freedoms because of discrimination against them on the basis of their age in combination with gender, ethnicity, disability, national status, economic status and other grounds. The analysis illustrates how intersectional discrimination takes various forms, such as discrimination within laws and policies or by state authorities (structural intersectionality), and discrimination in political and public forums for participation (political and representational intersectionality). These forms of discrimination can be intentional or unintentional in character, the latter resulting when an apparently neutral provision or practice is discriminatory in its effects. The analysis further distinguishes between the external sphere (state and society) and the internal sphere (family and community) where children experience interrelated forms of discrimination, and shows how this increases the disempowerment of the child. It is argued that in order to protect the human dignity of all children on an equal footing, existing human rights law must be interpreted and assessed in a way that cuts across traditionally separated legal categories. Furthermore, in order to fully address violations against the rights of the child, legal provisions are necessary that directly target intersectional discrimination. Secondly, a concrete illustration is presented of addressing intersectionality within programmes for child protection, using the example of rights-based programming to prevent and respond to child trafficking. Through a focus on the impact that discrimination has on children‟s rights, the importance is underlined of giving systematic and comprehensive attention to children‟s vulnerability to intersectional discrimination within anti-trafficking programming. The analysis shows that Romani children, and many other children who experience discrimination on interrelated grounds, have difficulties in accessing their entitlements to a broad range of human rights. These include legal guarantees and procedural rights, information, education, participation, health and social assistance, and identity rights. Consequently these children‟s access to anti-trafficking measures is affected, since the prevention of child trafficking, and protection and empowerment of children, essentially depend upon the enacting of these key child rights. Furthermore, when anti-trafficking measures do not take issues of intersectionality into account they may unintentionally reproduce the exclusion of those children who are vulnerable to intersectional discrimination. On this basis, the paper highlights areas where intersectional discrimination can be addressed within programming against child-trafficking in order to ensure the full and equal protection of all children. The recommendations hold relevance for child protection programming more widely. The main recommendation is to adopt holistic intersectional approaches within the international field of human rights. This requires comprehensive research and the systematic collection of data on which children are vulnerable to such forms of discrimination and in which sectors it occurs. Research should be conducted with children to get a nuanced insight into these issues, and to better understand children‟s reality. A holistic intersectional approach also includes identification of good practices and capacity building of professionals and institutions involved in child protection on diversity and discrimination issues. This includes establishing forums for dialogue to target discriminatory practices in society, including among children themselves, so that children do not reproduce discriminatory attitudes dominant in society. At the same time, children and adolescents who experience discrimination on interrelated grounds, namely intersectional discrimination, should be consulted and involved in developing policies and programmes that address discrimination It is important to interpret traditionally separated areas of human rights law in closer relation to each other, as well as to develop new legal provisions and political commitments that directly target intersectional discrimination. The concepts of structural, political and representational intersectionality and internal/external intersectionalities serve in this paper to distinguish between the different forms of discrimination affecting children and thus to identify the particular measures needed to address these issues.

The paper provides an overview and analysis of the initial steps for the establishment process of a separate children‟s ombudsman in Turkey. It examines the legal, political and social reasons why an ombudsman for children would be needed in the country. Specifically, it analyses Turkey‟s legal framework and international obligations, concluding that lack of implementation of the law and monitoring of children‟s rights are the main challenges. Children have disproportionately high rates of poverty, and are often victims of various forms of violence, in particular girls. The political structure of the country is affected by significant tensions, especially with regard to the place of religion in the public sphere. Moreover, civil society is quite weak. A law for a general ombudsman has been adopted by the Turkish Grand National Assembly but recently cancelled by the Constitutional Court. The paper analyses the possible reasons for the stalemate and looks at the text of the law from a child rights perspective. Drawing lessons from the foregoing, the study assesses the goals, risks and opportunities of the establishment process. It focuses on the need to build consensus on the objectives of the institution, ensure its independence, and implement the establishment process with the participation of key actors, including children. The study concludes with a set of recommendations.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child has been one of the main instigators for the development of independent human rights institutions for the promotion and protection of children‟s rights. Relying on article 4 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it adopted a general comment on this issue in 2002, and now consistently encourages State parties to establish or strengthen such institutions in its concluding observations. Efforts have been made recently with human rights treaty bodies to enhance the involvement of independent institutions at each stage of the reporting process. For independent institutions specifically in charge of monitoring children‟s rights, this implies an important contribution to the work of the Committee. Their status of independence from their government in the reporting process has been emphasized and some institutions submit a separate report to the Committee. Importantly, institutions have a critical role to play in the follow-up and monitoring of the implementation of the concluding observations of the Committee. Finally, there are other instances where independent institutions can interact with the Committee, beyond the reporting process. These include days of general discussion, the drafting of general comments, and support to campaigns such as the campaign for a CRC complaints mechanism. In conclusion, both the Committee and independent institutions can significantly build on each other to strengthen their capacity to promote the realization of children‟s rights.

This paper identifies and evaluates qualitative methods appropriate for use in conducting policy-relevant research on the experiences, motivations, agency and life histories of autonomous and semi-autonomous children and adolescents, including those who migrate independently of parents and adult guardians. First, the paper presents an overview of qualitative research practice and the potential for qualitative research to extend and deepen knowledge of children’s varied and independently negotiated life circumstances. It is argued that qualitative approaches are necessary to understand and meaningfully respond to the experiences of diverse physical, social and cultural environments. Research ethics are discussed from several points of view, highlighting both the importance of maintaining, and difficulty of defining, ethical engagement with subjects whose vulnerabilities and capabilities are manifest in ways that unsettle many traditional conceptions of children. The second, longer section of the paper presents illustrative examples of qualitative research techniques. An illustrated inventory of research tools is presented with seven categories: surveys; interviews and focus groups; observation and participant observation; life histories and biographical methods; visual and textual methods; performance, play and arts-based methods; and virtual and computer-aided methods. Particular attention is given to practical details of field research, including subject recruitment/sampling, research setting, facilitation of interaction with subjects through intermediary contacts and organizations, and the specific steps taken to collect qualitative data. The concluding section synthesizes the information presented and provides guidance on how to incorporate qualitative methods, and qualitative methodologies, into research on children who live independently of parents and adult guardians or who exercise autonomy in more limited contexts.

At the first World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (Stockholm, 1996), governments of 119 countries, together with UN agencies, NGOs and other organizations and individuals, adopted a Declaration and Agenda for Action that committed them to: a) Promote the participation of children, including child victims, young people, their families, peers and others who are potential helpers of children so that they are able to express their views and to take action to prevent and protect children from commercial sexual exploitation and to assist child victims to be reintegrated into society; and b) I dentify or establish and support networks of children and young people as advocates of child rights, and include children, according to their evolving capacity, in developing and implementing government and other programmes concerning them. The 2nd World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (Yokohama, 2001) followed up on efforts to strengthen the commitments made in Stockholm. It also included regional commitments, statements and declarations. World Congress III against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents takes place in Rio de Janeiro from 25 to 28 November 2008, and it aims to promote a broader agenda on children’s civil rights and children’s active role as citizens. Child protection is a focus of research, policy and programming in UNICEF as well as other UN agencies, NGOs and governments. Results of this work have helped a range of partners identify and reach the most vulnerable children and protect all children from abuse and exploitation. Together with partners, UNICEF has promoted children’s participation in a number of ways. Examples include the UN Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children in 2006 and its follow up, as well as UNICEF’s engagement with the Committee on the Rights of the Child in its deliberations over the decision to develop a General Comment on article 12, which will address the right to be heard. A ‘Day of General Discussion on the Rights of the Child to be Heard’ was held by the Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2006. These efforts support government decisions and actions to be informed by children’s and adolescents’ realities and recommendations. This paper presents an overview of government commitments to strengthen participation by children and adolescents to protect them from sexual abuse and exploitation. It also considers concrete recommendations for strengthening young people’s involvement in their own protection, based on their recommendations about what is needed to realize the Stockholm Declaration and Agenda for Action. Other useful inputs include case studies that offer new perspectives on children’s and adolescents’ participation to combat sexual exploitation and abuse. The paper provides recommendations for further research, policy development and programming intended to support advocacy and practice developments with and by children and adolescents. These are aimed at furthering achievement of their protection and participation rights during and after World Congress III. The paper calls for governments, UN agencies and NGOs to promote children’s civil rights and recognize their agency and the diversity of childhood experiences. It highlights the importance of strengthening child protection systems, developing and strengthening child-led groups and networks, and creating processes and mechanisms for children to access information, express their views, participate in practice and policy matters concerning them and gain feedback. It further highlights the need for better implementation of international standards that recognize and promote children’s participation and encourage special efforts to address discrimination and involve the most marginalized girls and boys.

One of the core requirements of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is that States Parties should undertake all necessary and appropriate measures to implement the rights recognized therein. However, the implementation of economic, social and cultural rights is a particular challenge for the discretionary power of the State Party because it has to determine what the available resources are. The Committee encourages “other competent bodies” and NGOs to have an active role in effective implementation of the Convention. This opens the way for independent monitoring bodies such as IHRICs, to provide expert advice on implementation. This paper discusses the need for such bodies, their role, possible mandate and powers, guiding principles, as well as the problems of financing and independence. A fundamental feature of the activities of IHRICs is the participation of civil society and children themselves.

In comparison to the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) systems of many other advanced economies the German system can be characterised as relative uniform, when looking at programmes and providers. But in other ways, there are considerable variations. There are considerate regional differences in governance, funding, and attendance rates, in particular with respect to certain socio-economic groups. This paper describes and evaluates these differences, mainly from an economic perspective and also taking child well-being into account. In Germany (a federal republic of 16 states) the federal government has legislative and organizational authority over the area of child and youth welfare, including ECEC services. Nevertheless, the provision and financing of programmes are a state and municipality responsibility, for which the later must plan and ensure the provision of ECEC services. Within this framework the federal government recently set the political goal of increasing the supply of ECEC places for children below the age of three to 35 per cent by 2013. This is the first time ever that the federal government has made a concrete commitment to allocate federal funds to the sector, given the federal framework special means had to be found to do so.

The aim of this text is to provide a review of the literature and current policies of early childhood education and care in the economically most advanced countries of the world. The introductory chapter 1 provides some basic definitions: what is meant by ‘early childhood services’ both in the narrow sense of care and education services for young children (family day care, childcare centres, pre-primary educational services, integrated services, etc.) and in the wider sense of services supporting the holistic development of young children. Beyond early care and education, other services that support the broad development of young children are policies that sustain parents and parenting, parental leave, family-friendly policies, infant health services and policies that reduce child and family poverty. Explanations are also provided about the age notation used in this paper, and the meaning of the term ‘rich countries’. The section ends with five charts that provide the reader with a rapid overview of key elements of early childhood systems in the rich countries: investment by the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in early childhood services; maternity, paternity and parental leave entitlements; effective parental leave provision across OECD countries; the main institutional forms of early childhood services in the participating countries, and entitlements by age to early childhood services across selected OECD countries. Chapter 2 addresses the question of the rights and well-being of young children. Information is drawn from five main texts: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989); General Comment No. 7 issued by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (2006); Innocenti Report Card 4, ‘A League Table of Educational Disadvantage in Rich Nations (2002); Innocenti Report Card 6, ‘Child Poverty in Rich Countries’ (2005); and Innocenti Report Card 7, ‘Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries’ (2007). A strong message coming from these reports is how greatly government social policies and income transfers can alleviate family poverty and lessen its impact on the health, well-being and educational outcomes of young children. Chapter 3 explores the economic and social context of children’s services, and seek to explain the contemporary focus on the upbringing and education of young children. Three profound changes are challenging traditional views of childhood and child-rearing: the changing socio-economic role of women; the changing demography and population diversity of rich countries; and third, the new education ideology with its focus on social equity and preparation for school. The chapter discusses different approaches adopted by countries towards the new challenges posed by these changes, and outlines some of the impacts of upstream socio-economic policies on families and young children. It points also to a certain ‘path dependency’ adopted by different groups of countries in their manner of conceptualizing and organizing early childhood services, stemming from their traditional politicoeconomic structures. Chapter 4 provides a rationale for substantial state investment in early childhood services. It lists and briefly describes some 16 research analyses from 10 different countries showing the benefits generated by early childhood programmes. The research studies are grouped under two headings: analyses showing economic and labour market returns from investment and analyses showing educational returns from investment. The section summary concludes that strong social, economic and education rationales exist in favour of establishing and maintaining national networks of early childhood services, on the condition that these systems aim for and achieve high quality. Some doubts remain, however, concerning the appropriate age at which young children should begin day-long, out-of-home care, and for how long children should stay in out-of-home care during the day. Chapter 5 recalls briefly the promise that participation in high-quality early childhood services holds for the individual child and at a wider level, for society as a whole. Such high-quality services provide significant support to education systems, social policy, gender equality and economies as a whole. The ability to boost the female employment rate from a level of 61.5 per cent (the OECD average) to a participation rate of 76.2 per cent (the case of Denmark) is a powerful stimulus both to the economy and to household budgets. In parallel, the contribution of early childhood services to later achievement in education is of major importance. The chapter goes on to summarize how countries have responded to this promise. In particular, the following themes are examined: the greatly improved access to services for children 3-6 years in almost all countries; the steadily improving regulation and support for quality, and the merits and demerits of establishing targeted programmes for children at risk. Finally, a discussion on the funding of early childhood services is engaged; it evaluates the level of the financial commitments made by countries to early childhood services and the modes of financing that they employ. A short conclusion proposes a dynamic social market model that brings together the dynamism and choice that market approaches can present with the strong investment, effective control and equity in access that public systems have traditionally offered in several countries. Further research is needed on how to create effective social markets, that is, networks of mixed provision in which choice and innovation exist, while maintaining equity and a sense of national and community responsibility for essential services. Widely different levels of purchasing power may be acceptable in the case of commodities or personal convenience, but in the fields of public health and education, they can undermine equity and social solidarity. The UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre and the OECD Social Policy Division have reviewed the initial draft of the analysis. Several early childhood experts and senior early childhood administrators from OECD countries also made helpful comments, and their assistance is gratefully acknowledged. The paper is complemented by Bennett, J. (2008), ‘Benchmarks for Early Childhood Services in OECD Countries’, Innocenti Working Paper No. 2008-02.

This paper presents a summary of the findings of the national and subnational surveys on child injury in this series and discusses implications of the results for child health policy and programmes. The principal finding is that injury has been largely unrecognized as a leading cause of child death. This is largely because the previous estimates of child mortality causality were unable to include injury due to technical issues. The surveys provide convincing evidence that injury is a leading cause of child death after infancy and that the types of injury vary with the age group of the child. Similar convincing evidence shows that injury is a leading cause of serious morbidity and permanent disability in children and that the types of injury with these outcomes also vary with the age of the child. The implications discussed are (1) an effective measure of child mortality needs to be developed to include all ages of childhood; (2) prevention of mortality and serious morbidity from injury in children will require a life-cycle approach; (3) continued progress on child survival programming in children under five years of age will require injury reductions; (4) since drowning is the single injury cause responsible for about half of all injury deaths, targeting it for reduction would be an efficient strategy; and (5) there are efficient strategies for targeting other subtypes of child injury as well.

This paper presents a more detailed description of the survey methodology for technical specialists interested in understanding the major differences between the surveys and the methods used in making the previous estimates of child deaths. A detailed description is provided for survey governance, sampling design, survey instruments, the classification scheme for mortality and morbidity measured in the surveys, the fieldwork procedure, the analytic framework, weighting and adjustments and survey costs. Following this, a number of methodological lessons are addressed, such as: the need to count all children and not only those under five years of age; the need to count all clearly identifiable causes of death in those same groups; the need to count morbidity as well as mortality; and the need to count the deaths in the community where they occur to avoid the various biases associated with facility-based counting. A number of examples from the surveys are shown to illuminate the issues so that they are clear for non-technical readers.

An accumulation of research across hundreds of studies shows the benefits of quality early childhood care and education for children’s later learning, school success and social development. In recognition of the value of providing early learning opportunities, many nations have expanded early childhood care and education in recent years. Mexico provides an interesting case in which expansion of early childhood care and education has occurred in the past 5 years, as have initiatives to improve quality and revise the national curriculum for preschoolers. This paper examines three policy initiatives that occurred in Mexico between 2000 and 2006 – preschool expansion, quality improvement and curricular reform. The preschool expansion included a mandate for all parents in Mexico to send their preschool-aged children (3, 4 and 5 years old) to preschool, with target dates of 2004, 2005 and 2008 for 100 per cent coverage of 5-year-olds, 4-yeaolds and 3-year-olds, respectively. The quality improvement initiative was part of a larger programme providing supplemental funds to select preschools and schools in Mexico’s public education system. Finally, the curricular reform instituted a new preschool curriculum to be implemented nationwide for all programmes across the 3- to 5-year-old age range. We utilize a combination of national data and synthesis of existing studies to review each policy according to the three dimensions of coverage, quality and equity. We find that the preschool mandate resulted in rapid increases in enrolment. In 2005, 98 per cent of 5-year-olds, 81 per cent of 4-year-olds and 25 per cent of 3-year-olds were enrolled in preschool. The greatest increases occurred among 4- year-olds. A consequence of the rapid increase for 4-year-olds was that coverage for 3-year-olds actually declined in approximately half of the Mexican states. The slow progress in enrolment of 3- year-olds is seen to be affected also by reluctance on the part of parents. We draw attention to the international discussion on how best to respond to the development needs of children around the age of three and suggest alternatives to centre, education-based systems. Although national averages of class size did not increase significantly, the proportion of preschools with average student-adult ratio of 30 or more did rise significantly in the general, CENDI, indigenous and CONAFE systems. In the general system (the largest system), the increase in proportion of preschools with average ratio of 30 or more from 12 per cent in 2001 to 18 per cent in 2005. The average increase in these structural indicators of quality was relatively small due to increases in numbers of preschools, particularly in urban areas. The impact of the mandate on other aspects of quality is unclear. The quality improvement initiative affected a relatively small number of preschools. In addition, the preschools that received quality improvement funds in the first 2 years of the programme were relatively larger and had more resources to begin with than other preschools. The national curricular reform was created after a comprehensive process of obtaining input from teachers, directors and early education officials from across all the Mexican states. This process resulted in the implementation of an open curriculum based on comprehensive notions of the multiple domains of competencies in early childhood development. The curriculum requires high levels of teacher initiative and reflective practice. We provide information regarding how teachers, principals and other educators have responded to this demanding and challenging curriculum. The paper concludes with policy options in each of the areas of preschool expansion, quality improvement and curricular reform. More funding is needed particularly targeted to ECCE services in poor and vulnerable communities, to support teachers achieve their licenciatura, to address the needs of preschools with very large student:teacher ratios and to develop strong systems of monitoring and research for the continuous adaptation of the system, particularly with respect to equity in access to quality services.

The paper reflects on the potential of the OECD DAC creditor reporting system to systematically capture flows of official development assistance (ODA) in support of realising children’s rights. The growth in modalities for delivering aid, including sector programmes, SWAP’s, dedicated funds which encompass public-private partnerships such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, as well as the OECD-DAC commitment to promote harmonization and simplification in provision of ODA and promote government ownership through general budget support raises challenges to assessing ODA for children. The question also needs asking whether singling out and measuring direct assistance to children is meaningful. The paper goes on to analyse ODA trends for basic social services. It shows that ODA to basic social services as a proportion of total ODA has been on an upward trend during the 1995-2004 period, particularly since 2000, the year in which the Millennium Summit set out the Millennium Agenda including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and further boosted by the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development. It shows that ODA to combat HIV and address AIDS infections has increased rapidly since 2000, but does not alone explain the overall increased aid share for basic social services. The analysis further confirms that social sector programmes and sector wide approaches (SWAP’s) are on the rise but still account only form a small portion of total ODA to basic social services although a number of such programmes are targeted specifically to basic services.

This paper is produced alongside Innocenti Report Card 7 Child Well-being in Rich Countries. It provides more detail on how the indicators were chosen for the Report Card, and how they were combined into components and then into dimensions. It also provides additional analysis to complement the Report Card. We started working on this topic in reaction to the cautious approach to indicator development of the Indicators Sub Committee of the European Union Social Protection Committee. The so-called Laeken Primary and Secondary Indicators are not well adjusted to capture children’s well-being and currently only contain child breakdowns for a relative poverty measure and jobless households. Although in the report by Professor Tony Atkinson and colleagues prepared for the Luxembourg Presidency (Atkinson et al., 2005) there was a proposal that children should be ‘mainstreamed’, it was suggested (by the Head of Eurostat) that only one child-related indicator should be added to the Laeken Primary Indicators – on educational achievement. Our aspiration was to demonstrate that much more was possible using already available data. So during the UK Presidency of the EU we set about building an index of child well-being that will be published in Social Indicators Research (Bradshaw, Hoelscher and Richardson, 2006). The EU index is different to the analysis developed in this paper mainly because it exploits European data sources not available for OECD countries. This paper begins in Section 1 with a background review of previous conceptualisations of child wellbeing. Then in Section 2 we develop a framework for the analysis drawing on a rights-based approach; notions of creating of well-being; and ideas about children’s interaction with their environment. Section 3 reviews the methods employed in developing the dimensions. Section 4 presents the results for each dimension. Section 5 is a concluding discussion. There is an appendix containing the raw data.

This paper examines poverty in recent years among children in the countries of South Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The indicator used to measure poverty – current household consumption tested against an absolute poverty threshold of US $2.15 converted at Purchasing Power Parity exchange rates – is found to be robust to sensitivity testing, and to correlate well with non-income indicators of well-being among children. The absolute poverty rate among children is highest where national income is lowest, and where the density of children in the population is highest. The paper analyses two dimensions of child poverty – according to household composition, and according to its urban, rural and regional dimensions. The most important findings from a policy point of view are the strong rural character of child poverty, and the relationship between child population density (at the level of the country, the sub-national region, and the household) and child poverty: where child population shares are higher, child poverty rates are also higher. This relationship, moreover, may have strengthened over time. Child population density needs to be seen more as a trigger to redistribution. In addition, the analysis finds that in some countries, poverty among children of single parents is reduced by their particular patterns of migration and remittance’s flows. However, parental migration to economically support children raises important questions about material wellbeing in relation to other aspects of child well-being. These warrant further analysis.

We compare three EU countries that have recently experienced substantial but very different reforms of their systems to support families with children: Austria, Spain and the United Kingdom. The structure of these systems is different: Austria gives emphasis to universal benefits, Spain to tax concessions and the United Kingdom to means-tested benefits. As a first step the paper compares the distributional implications of these three approaches. The recent reforms have reinforced these existing structures while increasing the amount of public resources directed towards children. The second step is to address the question whether the chosen strategies are the best for each country. What would have happened if instead of reinforcing the existing types of policies these countries had completely transformed the architecture of their systems in either of the other two directions? We use EUROMOD - the European tax-benefit microsimulation model that is designed for making cross-country comparisons and for answering ‘what if’ questions such as these – to explore the effects of alternative budget-neutral reforms. In particular, in addition to assessing the effects of countries’ actual child related reforms from 1998 to 2003, we simulate the substitution (‘swap’) of child related benefits and tax concessions from one country to another. The changes in household disposable income resulting from these reforms are used to assess their impact on the position of children in the income distribution as a whole, the proportions gaining and losing and the effects on child poverty. The analysis of the 1998 and 2003 systems reveal that, in real terms, the average spending per child increased by 31 per cent in Austria (from €169 to €220 per month), 150 per cent in Spain (from €13 to €34), and 71 per cent in the UK (€102 to €174). In Austria and the UK the increase in spending per child is relatively evenly spread over the income distribution, with a slightly lower increase at the top. In Spain the rise in per child spending in the two bottom deciles is negligible, whereas children in the top quintile receive on average more than ten times as much under the 2003 rules as under the 1998 rules. Child poverty rates fall in all countries, but the reductions are particularly significant in the UK (from 32% to 20%) and Austria (12% to 9%). The swap of 2003 child policies allows us to draw some conclusions about the three systems regardless of the country in which they are implemented. On vertical equity grounds, UK policies are the most successful at reducing child poverty in all three countries and using a range of proportions of the median as poverty thresholds. In terms of horizontal equity, the Austrian system generates the highest redistribution from childless individuals to families with children and guarantees, in all countries, the right to a similar level of protection for all children regardless their parent’s income position. On the other hand, with a low expenditure level and a pro-rich distribution, the Spanish policies can hardly meet any equity objective. While there are some important aspects that have not been considered in this study, for example the effect of the alternative systems on parental work incentives and on benefit take-up rates, and the role of in-kind benefits, this study demonstrates the potential of comparing systems of support by ‘swapping’ them between countries. This method using microsimulation allows us to distinguish between the effects of level of spending, the relative importance of policy structure and design, and the differential impacts of policies in particular national contexts.

This paper considers three groups of children affected by international migration: (i) children left behind by international labour migrants from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand; (ii) children of Thai nationals in Japan; and (iii) children brought along by irregular migrants in Malaysia and Thailand. Based on the limited data available from published sources, the paper constructs preliminary estimates of numbers of children involved. It then synthesizes available evidence on problems and opportunities faced by the children, and on policies towards them. There are, however, important gaps in the available evidence. The paper identifies these gaps, and suggests ways in which they might be filled. The paper also makes policy recommendations. The growth of international migration in Southeast Asia has affected significant numbers of children. Some necessarily crude calculations suggest that 3-6 million children have been left behind by Filipino parents working overseas; the equivalent figure for Indonesia is something like one million, and for Thailand half a million. These numbers imply that roughly 10-20 per cent of Filipino children, and 2-3 per cent of Indonesian and Thai children, have a parent overseas. Based on good evidence from the Philippines, and scattered evidence from Indonesia and Thailand, it appears that (i) migration of parents improves the material conditions of the children left behind, which probably flows through to children’s health and schooling, and (ii) the social costs are strongly mitigated by the involvement of the extended family. In the Philippines, but less so in Indonesia and Thailand, governmental and non-governmental organizations already provide a range of services for children and migrants. Meanwhile, in Thailand, there are over 100,000 children of undocumented migrants from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. There are tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of children of Indonesian migrants in Malaysia. Scattered evidence suggests that these children face much greater difficulties than the children left at home by Filipino, Indonesia, and Thai workers. The children brought along to Thailand and Malaysia appear to be significantly poorer than other children in their host countries, and to have limited access to social services. In Thailand, however, current efforts to register foreign workers and their dependants may lead to improved access, at least in the short term. A number of practical, low-cost policies to address the problems of children left behind by labour migrants from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines have been suggested or implemented. If further research were to show that particular subgroups, such as those with both parents overseas, suffered special disadvantages, then high-cost interventions for these subgroups might be justified. However, more general high-cost interventions covering all children left behind by labour migrants are not justified on current evidence, since this evidence suggests that children do not appear, on average, to face greater difficulties than other children in the same societies. Attention should instead be focused on children brought along by undocumented migrants. Thailand’s current registration campaigns represent a major policy experiment, and the effects on children need to be carefully monitored. Regulations governing the entry and exit of migrants strongly influence family migration strategies and the ability of parents to maintain contact with their children. These affects need to be taken into account when regulations are designed. For policy purposes, the most important gaps in current knowledge about children left behind by labour migrants probably concern differences among children. For instance, there is still no conclusive evidence on whether children with absent mothers suffer more problems than children with absent fathers. A sensible first stage in filling this gap would be to exploit existing household survey data. Most published research dealing with children of undocumented migrants in Thailand consists of small-scale studies of highly disadvantaged groups such as sex workers. There have been few studies looking at mainstream migrants, or comparing migrants with the surrounding population. The best way to begin such research would be to exploit existing data from the Kanchanaburi Field Station. In Malaysia, a promising source on children of Indonesian migrants is ethnographic work carried out by Malaysian students. More generally, there is a need for research on how immigration regulations affect family migration strategies and the well-being of the children.

This paper offers a descriptive portrait of income poverty among children in Germany between the early 1980s and 2001, with a focus on developments since unification in 1991. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to estimate poverty rates, rates of entry to and exit from poverty, and the duration of time spent in and out of poverty. The analysis focuses upon comparisons between East and West Germany, by family structure, and citizenship status. Child poverty rates have drifted upward since 1991, and have been increasing more than the rates for the overall population since the mid-1990s. In part these changes are due to increasing poverty among children from households headed by noncitizens. Children in single parent households are by all measures at considerable risk of living in poverty. There are also substantial differences in the incidence of child poverty and its dynamics between East and West Germany.

This paper documents levels and changes in child poverty rates in 12 OECD countries using data from the Luxembourg Income Study project, and focusing upon an analysis of the reasons for changes over the 1990s. The objective is to uncover the relative role of income transfers from the state in determining the magnitude and direction of change in child poverty rates, holding other demographic and labour market factors constant. As such the paper offers a cross-country overview of child poverty, changes in child poverty and the impact of public policy in North America and Europe. The paper offers a set of country specific results, and also attempts to draw general lessons. First, family and demographic forces play only a limited role in determining changes in child poverty rates. These forces change only gradually and are limited in their ability to cushion children from detrimental shocks originating in the labour market or in the government sector, which are the sources of the major forces determining the direction of change in child poverty. Second, in countries facing severe economic crises it does not appear that the amount of social transfers available were increased in a way to cushion children from these changes and put a backstop on their risk of low income. Indeed, just the opposite appears to have occurred in countries experiencing the largest increases in child poverty. Third, there is no single road to lower child poverty rates. Changes in income transfers need to be thought through in conjunction with the nature of labour markets. Reforms intended to increase the labour supply and labour market engagement of adults may or may not end up lowering child poverty rates. At the same time increases in the level of support have also been shown to be a central ingredient in lowering the child poverty rate both when it is very high and when it is already quite low. In the majority of the countries analyzed there has been little progress in reducing child poverty rates. Child poverty unambiguously fell in only three of the twelve countries under study, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Norway. In the remaining seven countries child poverty rates were essentially unchanged since 1990 or rose significantly. The analytical approach does not aim to consider the behavioural interactions between the various variables on incomes. Nonetheless the analysis might be seen as a starting point for discussions of the extent to which children in some relatively rich countries have experienced changes in the risk of living in low income given the standards prevailing during the late 1980s and early 1990s.