Innocenti Working Papers

The paper provides an examination of the relevance of ethics to poverty reduction. Ethics examines the nature and scope of institutions as the deepest level of analysis. The ethics of poverty is understood as the principles and processes of justification employed to justify assisting people in poverty. The paper argues that ethical perspectives are relevant to understanding poverty and the priority given to poverty reduction in society. It further argues that ethical perspectives inform the design and scope of anti-poverty programmes. Drawing on the recent expansion of social assistance in Brazil, South Africa and Ghana, the paper shows that ethical perspectives are relevant to our understanding of the evolution of anti-poverty policy.

This research report explores children’s accounts of everyday violence in Ethiopia, and the ways in which factors at individual, family, community, institutional and society levels affect children’s experiences of violence. The report primarily draws on analysis of four rounds of longitudinal qualitative data gathered over seven years, complemented with analysis of cross-sectional survey data from Young Lives. After a brief description of the policy context and literature review, the paper describes the study then presents findings from the survey and qualitative research, exploring home, schools, communities, differences by age and gender, and children’s responses to violence. Violence affecting children – mostly physical punishment and emotional abuse – is widespread, accepted, and normalized. Differing economic activities affect family dynamics and the likelihood of children experiencing violence, which is often linked to the challenges of poverty and the expectation that children will contribute to the household economy. The report adds to knowledge about the nature and experiences of violence affecting children in resource-poor settings, and concludes with some suggestions for policies, programming and practice.

This paper explores children’s accounts of violence in Andhra Pradesh, India, and the ways in which factors at the individual, family, community, institutional and society levels affect children’s experiences of violence. The paper analyses cross-sectional survey data and case studies from longitudinal qualitative data gathered over a seven-year period, from Young Lives. The paper is divided into four sections – a brief background section, study design and methods, findings from the survey, and findings from case studies. Large proportions of children experience violence (mostly physical punishment and emotional abuse) within their families, at school and, to some extent, within their communities. The findings demonstrate how children’s experiences of violence change with age and that gender differences within this dynamic process are very distinct. The paper reveals that a child’s disapproval of violence does not necessarily influence behaviour in later life, confirming the need for interventions to prevent and tackle violence as children grow up. More promisingly, children also describe strategies through which to protect themselves from violence and the threat of violence. The paper contributes to knowledge about the nature and experience of violence among children in resource poor settings, and concludes with some suggestions for policy, programming and practice.

We study the impact of the Zimbabwe Harmonized Social Cash Transfer (HSCT) on household food security after 12 months of implementation. The programme has had a strong impact on a well-known food security scale – the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) – but muted impacts on food consumption expenditure. However aggregate food consumption hides dynamic activity taking place within the household where the cash is used to obtain more food from the market and rely less on food received as gifts. The cash in turn gives them greater choice in their food basket which improves diet diversity. Further investigation of the determinants of food consumption and the HFIAS shows that several dimensions of household vulnerability correlate more strongly with the HFIAS than food consumption. Labour constraints, which is a key vulnerability criterion used by the HSCT to target households, is an important predictor of the HFIAS but not food expenditure, and its effect on food security is even larger during the lean season.

This report provides the first comprehensive national estimates of multidimensional child poverty in Armenia, measured using UNICEF’s Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology. Dimensions and indicators for three age groups (0-5, 6-14 and 15-17) were selected as the result of a broad consultative process with key stakeholders convened by UNICEF Armenia. Based on nationally representative data from the Armenian Integrated Living Conditions Survey 2013/14, the study finds that 64 per cent of children under 18 are deprived in 2 or more dimensions, with a substantially higher rate in rural than in urban areas. The highest rates of deprivation are in access to utilities, quality housing and leisure activities. More than one in four children are both multidimensionally deprived and live in consumption-poor households, while more than one in three are deprived but do not live in poor households. The findings suggest that to target the most vulnerable children, policies should concentrate on closing the rural/urban divide in infrastructure and on strengthening social safety nets, especially in rural areas.

Worldwide close to 800 million people are reached by state-operated cash transfer programmes. In sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest region in the world, the number of cash transfer programmes has doubled in the last five years and reaches close to 50 million people. What is the impact of these programmes, and do they offer a sustained pathway out of ultra-poverty? In this paper we examine these questions using experimental data from two unconditional cash transfer programmes implemented by the Government of Zambia. We find far-reaching effects of these two programmes, not just on their primary objective, food security and consumption, but also on a range of productive and economic outcomes. After three years, we observe that household spending is 59 per cent larger than the value of the transfer received, implying a sizeable multiplier effect. These multipliers work through increased non-farm business activity and agricultural production.

Seasonality in agricultural production continues to shape intra-annual food availability and prices in low-income countries. Using high-frequency panel data from northern Ethiopia, this study attempts to quantify seasonal fluctuations in children's weights. In line with earlier studies, we document considerable seasonality in children’s age and height adjusted weights. While children located closer to local food markets are better nourished compared to their counterparts residing in more remote areas, their weights are also subject to considerable seasonality. Further analysis provides evidence that children located closer to food markets consume more diverse diets than those located farther away. However, the content of these diets varies across seasons: children are less likely to consume animal source foods during the lean season. This leads us to conclude that households located near these food markets are not able to insulate their children from seasonal weight fluctuations. We discuss some policy options with potential to address this threat to child well-being.

While a long-standing literature analyses cross-country variation in the incidence of child poverty in rich countries in a single year, less is known about children’s individual movements into and out of low household income over a period of time. Using longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), the present study addresses this gap by analysing both income mobility and child poverty dynamics in the EU during the recent economic crisis. It finds that income growth among children has been generally pro-poor but not sufficiently so to put a brake on the increasing income inequality. There is substantial heterogeneity among the EU-SILC countries in the rates of child poverty entry and exit. Scandinavian countries tend to combine lower exit and entry rates, while Southern and Eastern European countries tend to have higher rates of both poverty exit and entry. Household-level income events, i.e. relative growth in employee earnings, are found to be the most important predictors of transitions in and out of poverty, followed by employment events (i.e. changes in the number of adult workers), while the relatively rare demographic events have little bearing on child poverty transitions in the EU-SILC.

Existing evidence is inconclusive on whether a socio-economic gradient in children’s cognitive ability widens, narrows or remains stable over time and there is little research on the extent of ‘cognitive mobility’ of children who had a poor start in life compared to their peers. Using data from five sweeps of the United Kingdom (UK) Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) at the ages of 9 months, 3 years, 5 years, 7 years and 11 years, this paper explores the cognitive ability trajectory of children in the bottom decile of the distribution at a given age, and the factors that drive or hinder their progress relative to their peers. Using discrete-time event history analysis methods, the paper analyses children’s risks of moving in and out of the bottom decile of the cognitive ability distribution. The findings indicate a relatively high level of cognitive mobility between ages 3 and 11, especially in the pre-school period (between ages 3 and 5), with children from income-poor households more likely to get ‘trapped’ in the bottom of the age-specific cognitive ability distribution. Parental education plays a dual buffer role: it protects children from falling behind their peers as well as increasing the chances of moving up the ability distribution. Parental involvement, such as reading to a child and regular bedtimes at the age of 3, was found to protect children from falling into the bottom group of cognitive distribution but not necessarily helping lower scoring children to move up.

In the context of increasing child poverty, deprivation rates and the relative child income gap, and with the most economically vulnerable children hit extensively by the crisis (Chzhen 2014), this paper sets out to understand who are the most disadvantaged children. Analysis of the composition of the children at the bottom end of the income distribution illustrates that households with a lone parent, at least one migrant member, low work intensity, low education, or in large families are overrepresented in the first decile to different degrees in European countries. The analyses also reveal immense differences in living standards for children across Europe. In European countries included in the analyses, at least 1 in 5 children in the poorest decile lives in a deprived household. A closer look at the different dimensions of deprivation at the child-specific level, reveals what living in the poorest decile means for children’s everyday life. Children in the bottom end of the income distribution are prone to a lack of a suitable place to study or do homework. The shares of children in the poorest decile living in a household that cannot afford fruit and vegetables daily or one meal with meat or protein at least once a day are worryingly high. They can also be considered to be deprived in relation to social aspects such as insufficient resources at home to provide regular leisure activity, or to invite friends to play or eat from time to time, or to participate in schools trips and school events that cost money.

A large body of literature has established socio-economic gradients in adolescent health, but few studies have investigated the extent to which these gradients are associated with very poor health outcomes. The current analysis examined the extent to which the socio-economic background of adolescents relates to very poor self-reported health and well-being (the so-called ’bottom end’). For this analysis, we use data from the last four cycles of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study (2001/02, 2005/06, 2009/10, and 2013/14) for 32 European and North American countries in the EU and/or OECD. We examined the following as indicators of adolescent health: psychosomatic health complaints; physical activity; healthy eating; unhealthy eating; and life satisfaction. Adolescents who scored below the mean of the lower half of the distribution of a given indicator fall in the “bottom group” on this indicator. Family affluence is used as a measure of adolescents’ socioeconomic background (transformed to ridit score). In the vast majority of the countries studied, adolescents from families with a relatively low socio-economic status had a greater likelihood of reporting poor health. The largest, most persistent and widespread socio-economic gradients are in life satisfaction, physical activity and healthy eating, while the findings are mixed for unhealthy eating and psychosomatic health. Socio-economic inequalities were largely stable, but in a sizeable minority of the countries, socio-economic inequalities in physical activity and healthy eating have widened between 2001/02 and 2013/14, while inequalities in unhealthy eating and life satisfaction have narrowed in several countries.

Measuring inequality of learning outcomes in a way that provides meaningful benchmarks for national policy while retaining a focus on those students who are ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to teach’ is a challenging but vital task in the light of the global post-2015 education agenda. Drawing on PISA 2012 data and its earlier rounds, this paper explores alternative approaches to measuring educational inequality at the ‘bottom-end’ of educational distribution within the cross-national context. Its main aim is to understand how far behind children are allowed to fall in their academic achievement compared to what is considered a standard performance in their country. Under the framework of relative (measured as achievement gap between the median and 10th percentile) and absolute (measured by the percentage of students achieving at a given benchmark) educational disadvantage it examines cross-country rankings as well as national trajectories with reference to overall academic progress. We find that on average across OECD countries around 11% of 15- year-olds lacked skills in solving basic reading, mathematical, as well as science, tasks in 2012, but variation across countries was large. The average achievement gap in mathematics across OECD countries between low-achieving and ‘average’ students stood at around 122 score points; in reading, at 131 score points; and in science, at 124 score points. This paper argues that understanding how the reduction in bottom-end inequality is achieved matters no less than the outcome itself, as it often reflects the level of support provided to low-achieving students. As our analysis shows, narrowing the achievement gap might be due to falling academic standards and have no direct benefit to the ‘bottom group’.

The health of children and adolescents in high income countries negatively relates to income inequality. Theoretical interpretations of this association suggest that inequality intensifies social hierarchies, erodes social or material resources that support health, or impacts socioemotional development in childhood and subsequently harms health. The evidence in support of this causal interpretation is limited by a reliance on cross-sectional, ecological studies. Using multilevel panel data from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, this paper examines lagged and contemporaneous associations between national income inequality and health and well-being during adolescence. Health symptoms and life satisfaction were measured in successive surveys of 11- to 15-year-olds in Europe and North America between 1994 and 2014. These data were linked to country-level income inequality for each survey year (contemporaneous effects) and for earlier developmental periods, at 0-4 years and 5-9 years (lagged effects), dating back to 1979 – the birth year of 15-year-olds in the 1994 survey cycle. Societal growth curve modelling was used to pool data from successive survey cycles and to isolate age, period, and cohort effects. The results show evidence of lagged effects of income inequality during childhood (5-9 years) on health symptoms and life satisfaction in adolescents (11-15 years), after differences in concurrent income inequality and income per capita, cohort, time period, and individual gender, age, and affluence were held constant. This period of development for income inequality exposure coincides with the early school years when social relationships extend from the family to school and community settings. Inequality may shape child developmental trajectories in ways that later manifest in reduced health and well-being. Though not causal evidence in the strictest sense, these findings establish antecedent-consequence conditions in the association between income inequality and health. The practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

The empowerment of women, broadly defined, is an often-cited objective and benefit of social cash transfer programmes in developing countries. Despite the promise and potential of cash transfers to empower women, the evidence supporting this outcome is mixed. In addition, there is little evidence from programmes that have gone to scale in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper reports findings from a mixed-methods evaluation of the Government of Zambia’s Child Grant Programme, a poverty-targeted, unconditional transfer given to mothers or primary caregivers of young children aged 0 to 5. The quantitative component was a four-year longitudinal clustered randomized control trial in three rural districts, and the qualitative component was a one-time data collection involving in-depth interviews with women and their partners, stratified on marital status and programme participation. Our study found that women in beneficiary households were making more sole and joint decisions (across five domains); however, impacts translated into relatively modest increases of an additional 0.34 of a decision made across nine domains on average. Qualitatively, we found that changes in intrahousehold relationships were limited by entrenched gender norms, which indicate men as heads of household and primary decision-makers. However, women’s narratives showed the transfer did increase overall household well-being because they felt increased financial empowerment and were able to retain control over transfers for household investment and savings for emergencies. The paper highlights methodological challenges in using intrahousehold decision-making as the primary indicator to measure empowerment. Despite this, the results show potential for national, poverty-targeted, unconditional, government-run programmes in Africa, to improve the well-being of female beneficiaries.

Among policymakers, a common perception surrounding the effects of cash transfer programmes, particularly unconditional programmes targeted to families with children, is that they induce increased fertility. We evaluate the Zambian Child Grant Programme, a large-scale government unconditional cash transfer targeted to families with a child under the age of five and examine impacts on fertility and household composition. The evaluation was a cluster randomized control trial, with data collected over four years from 2010 to 2014. Our results indicate there are no programme impacts on overall fertility. In addition, among young women under 25 years fertility actually decreased after 36 months, but impacts disappeared after 48 months. Our results contribute to a small evidence base demonstrating that there are no unintended incentives related to fertility due to cash transfers.

Childhood malnutrition remains a significant global problem with an estimated 162 million children under 5 suffering from stunted growth. Social protection interventions, in particular cash transfer programmes, have the potential to contribute to the improvement of child nutrition. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the impacts of cash transfer programmes on the immediate and underlying determinants of child nutrition, including the most recent evidence from impact evaluations across sub-Saharan Africa. It adopts the UNICEF extended model of care conceptual framework of child nutrition and highlights evidence on the main elements of the framework – food security, care and health care. The paper concludes that, while an increasing number of studies have stressed the positive role of cash transfer programmes in increasing resources for food, health and care, the evidence to date on the immediate determinants of child nutrition is mixed with respect to whether cash transfers can positively impact growth-related outcomes among children, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Key gaps that should be addressed in future research include cash transfer impacts on more proximate nutrition-related outcomes such as children’s dietary diversity, as well as caregiver behaviours, intra-household violence, and stress, all of which have implications for child health and well-being.

Establishing “what works under what conditions” is becoming a mantra in the development context, both in academia and among international development organizations. This, however, is not an issue of the technical modalities of service provision alone. Just as important is their contextual framing, including analyzing real time governance factors. It is necessary to understand and address bottlenecks that impede the success of an intervention, or that make an intervention that works well in one context unrealistic or inappropriate in another. This means having an analysis of institutions and the power relations within and between them, as well as the incentives motivating both elites and the behaviour of service users (or non-users, as the case may be). Coordination is a critical governance issue. UNICEF’s Monitoring Results for Equity approach identifies coordination as a determinant of results for children, alongside other governance issues such as budgeting, management and legislation. This is why the Office of Research has partnered with Guy Peters, Professor of American Governance at the University of Pittsburgh, to carry out two case studies on bottlenecks in coordination, of which this study in Ghana is the first.

This study provides the first estimates of national multidimensional child deprivation rates in Bosnia and Herzegovina using the National Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) pioneered by UNICEF. A participatory national process led to the selection of two age groups and a set of deprivation dimensions for each group. The analysis uses data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2011-2012 for children aged 0 to 4 and the Expanded Household Budget Survey (EHBS) 2011 for children aged 5 to 15. The dimensions analysed for children under five are: Nutrition, Health, Child Development, Violent Discipline, Information Access, and Housing, while for older children seven dimensions were used: Nutrition, Clothing, Educational Resources, Leisure, Social Participation, Information Access and Housing. This study shows that almost all children aged 0 to 4 (98.1%) are deprived in at least one dimension, and a third (33.2%) are deprived in four or more dimensions at a time. Almost three out of four children aged 5 to 15 (73.8%) are deprived in at least one dimension, while fewer than one in four (22.8%) are deprived in three or more dimensions. Poor children are more likely to be deprived in any of the dimensions studied and in any number of dimensions simultaneously. However, the degree of overlap between deprivation and poverty is moderate, with only 13.8% of 5-15-year-olds both poor and deprived in at least three out of seven dimensions studied. Some deprivations show a higher degree of sensitivity to household consumption (e.g. clothing and nutrition), while others are not as readily amenable to increasing household expenditure (e.g. information and housing). Therefore, policies aimed at reducing child poverty and deprivation need to improve both the spending power of households and the availability of services/infrastructure in local areas.

This study provides the first ever estimates of national child deprivation rates in Mali using the Multiple Overlapping Deprivations Approach (MODA) pioneered by UNICEF. Deprivations are defined according to the age of the child. A participatory national process led to the selection of four distinct age groups and a set of deprivation dimensions for each age group. The age groups are 0-23 months, 24-59 months, 5-14 years and 15-17 years. The younger age groups have 7 dimensions of deprivation while the older age groups have 6 dimensions. The national child deprivation rate is 50%, slightly higher than the national (monetary) child poverty rate of 46%. The deprivation rate is based on a threshold of 4 for children 0-59 months and 3 for children 5-17 years. The deprivation headcount is 60% in rural areas versus 16% in urban areas. The highest deprivation headcounts are found in Kidal (73%), Tombouctou (72%) and Mopti (68%). The headcount is 9% in Bamako. The overlap of children who are both poor and deprived is 29% of all children, hence not all children who are deprived are living in poor households as defined by the national poverty line. Only 58% of children who are deprived live in poor households. Similarly, only 62% of children in poor households are multidimensionally deprived. Consequently, policies that are targeted exclusively on monetary poverty will miss children who are deprived. Across regions in Mali the correlation between deprivation and poverty rates is uneven. The highest monetary poverty rate is in Sikasso (86%) where the child deprivation rate is around the national average. On the other hand, regions with the highest deprivation rates (Kidal, Tombouctou) have poverty rates of only 16% and 33% respectively. These patterns are related to the level of services available for families with children in each region and underscore the fact that low levels of poverty do not automatically translate into reductions in child deprivation. The relationship between being deprived and monetary poverty is strongest in rural areas for all age groups. An increase of USD 1 per person per day would reduce the probability of being deprived by 25 percentage points in rural areas. The specific dimensions most strongly linked with income are health for younger children and education for older children. Beyond income, maternal education is an important determinant of childhood deprivation, especially in rural areas. Children 0-59 months in rural areas whose mothers have attained secondary schooling are 21 percentage points less likely to be deprived; the comparable figure for older children 5-17 years of age is 20 percentage points.

This paper analyses multidimensional child deprivation across thirty countries in sub-Saharan Africa, applying the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology that measures various aspects of child poverty. The methodology has been adapted to the particular needs of this cross-country comparative study, standardising the indicators and thresholds to allow comparability across countries. Child poverty is defined as non-fulfilment of children’s rights to survival, development, protection and participation, anchored in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. DHS and MICS household survey data is used, taking the child as unit of analysis and applying a life-cycle approach when selecting dimensions and indicators to capture the different deprivations children experience at different stages of their life. The main objective of the paper is to present a direct method of child poverty measurement analysing deprivations experienced by the child. The paper goes beyond mere deprivation rates and identifies the depth of child poverty by analysing the extent to which the different deprivations are experienced simultaneously. The analysis is done across thirty countries in sub-Saharan Africa that together represent 78% of the region’s total population. The findings show that 67% of all the children in the thirty countries suffer from two to five deprivations crucial to their survival and development, corresponding to 247 million out of a total of 368 million children below the age of 18 living in these thirty countries. For the other 15 countries of sub-Saharan Africa where the CC-MODA analysis could not be carried out, predictions of child deprivation rates have been made using GDP per capita, urban population share, and population size. Based on the actual as well as the predicted multidimensional deprivation rates, just under 300 million children in sub-Saharan Africa are multidimensionally poor, being deprived in two to five dimensions crucial for their survival and development. The findings are also compared with other existing poverty measures, showing that for the countries included in the analysis, monetary poverty measures (both the international $1.25 a day and national poverty measures) are weak predictors of multidimensional child poverty. The study finds stronger correlation between multidimensional child deprivation and GDP per capita. The paper underlines that monetary poverty and multidimensional deprivation are conceptually different, complementary poverty measures and that there are advantages in measuring both simultaneously, especially when measuring child poverty.

Mounting pressure from the financial markets prompted most industrialized countries to engage in fiscal consolidation since 2010-2011, with social transfers among the most popular targets. To analyse the effect of the economic crisis and the ensuing fiscal stimulus and/or consolidation measures on children’s living conditions across the OECD and/or the EU, this paper investigates changes in disposable incomes of low-wage households with children since 2008, with a particular focus on family-related benefits. It uses the model family method coupled with tax-benefit simulation techniques for the period 2008-2012. The paper also summarises qualitatively significant changes to family-related benefits, some of which are too recent to have been included in the publicly available tax-benefit simulation models. Family benefits have been particularly hard hit between 2008 and 2012. Their real value declined for lone parent households (with two school-age children) earning 20% of the average wage in 20 out of 37 countries, although in nine of them, increases in housing benefits, in-work benefits or social assistance made up for it at least partially. Taking all social transfers into account, the households studied saw their net incomes fall in real terms due to benefit cuts in nine out of 37 countries: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Spain, and the UK.

Chile and Mexico experienced extraordinary economic and social improvements over the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, the 2008–2009 international crisis dramatically affected these two economies via real channels. Both countries reacted to the external shock by implementing several measures. However – thanks to the policies implemented during the period before the crisis – the Chilean government enjoyed more fiscal space and was able to introduce a stimulus package twice as large the Mexican one. In particular, Chile supported families with children via the expansion of the main social protection programme, additional cash transfers to the poorest families with children and passive labour market measures. In contrast, the worsening of fiscal conditions pushed Mexico into a fiscal consolidation process since 2010. As a result, child poverty dropped in Chile while it rose sharply in Mexico.

The goal of this paper is to monitor the impact of the Great Recession on child well-being in countries of the European Union. We use data from the EU-28 plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey to document the change in children’s well-being from 2007/8-2012/3. We classify countries into ‘least’, ’moderately’ and ‘most’ exposed to the global recession and document trends in well-being outcomes for each of the three groups. We find a strong correlation between exposure to the crisis and reductions in child well-being since 2007/8. Trends in labour market outcomes for young people aged 15-24 are notable in that while declines are sharpest among countries most affected by the crisis, there is a decline in all countries, even those least affected. We also discuss individual countries’ performance on a selection of child outcomes through the use of League Tables (LT); these LTs rank countries, showing top and bottom performers, based on the progress/setback experienced over the period 2007/8-2012/3. These results should be interpreted as early evidence on child well-being during the crisis, since the study period covers only up to 2012/3 for most indicators, and only through 2011 for monetary poverty.