'Child poverty has immediate and long term devastating impacts on children, as well as critical consequences for societies and economies: ending child poverty must be one of the defining achievements of our generation,' states the 2022 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report titled UNICEF’s Commitment to Ending Child Poverty and Achieving the SDGs: Measurement, Advocacy and Evidence Based Policies.
Apart from setting the goal of ending child poverty, globally, as a part of the Sustainable Development Goals 2030, the study also gives us much-needed perspective into how poverty impacts children’s rights to the standard of life, social protection and access to health and education. It shows that children at twice as likely as adults to live in extreme poverty, and if not addressed immediately, childhood poverty can persist long enough to create an intergenerational vicious cycle of poverty.
'As children become adults the impacts of child poverty reverberate over time where children with lived experiences of poverty become adults with less education, poorer health, fewer labour prospects and diminished human capital, in turn negatively impacting on productivity,' the study says. Add to all this the fact that COVID-19 has increased child poverty by an immense addition of 100 million children in 2020-2022.
The study also shows that child poverty is not confined to low-income countries. One in four children in the European Union is at risk; two out of every three children in Eastern and Southern Africa are affected by multidimensional poverty; 46 per cent of children aged 0-14 years in Latin America and the Caribbean live in poverty; and, a fifth of the world’s extremely poor children live in South Asia.
How does India fare in this global context of child poverty?
The UNICEF says that despite COVID-19, India has made quite a few strides when it comes to overall human development. Extreme poverty in the nation has reduced to 21 per cent. However, the state of women and children still remains tenuous at best. With 38.4 per cent of children suffering from stunted growth, malnutrition levels are still high. Only 42.5 per cent of children in third standard can read texts prescribed to the first standard. The incidence of vaccine-preventable diseases and child labour (https://www.hercircle.in/engage/theme/spotlight/child-labour-in-india-how-to-end-the-endemic-3733.html), both of which lead to hazardous and low-quality of life for children.
There is also a considerable gender gap which plagues India’s children. UNICEF says that while globally, 7 per cent more boys under the age of five die than girls, in India, 11 per cent more girls under the age die than boys. With an inverse sex ratio at birth of 900 girls born for every 1,000 boys, it is a gap that needs to be analysed and overcome urgently. India also has additional factors that make child poverty more acute—children from rural areas, urban slums, scheduled castes, tribal communities and other disadvantaged populations suffer more deprivations related to poverty, malnutrition, access to health and education, child marriage (https://www.hercircle.in/engage/get-inspired/achievers/how-child-marriage-ends-a-girls-childhood-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-1484.html), low learning outcomes, lack of sanitation facilities, hygiene and access to potable water.
To overcome all these factors that lead to intergenerational child poverty, the UNICEF recommends three key areas of work:
1. Governments must be supported in measuring, monitoring and reporting child poverty. Understanding the specific characteristics of child poverty can help lay the fundamental foundations for policies, which in turn can be designed and implemented according to the needs of a nation or region. These mechanisms can also help track progress towards ending child poverty.
2. Area-specific policies to end child poverty need to be designed and implemented based on prioritisation of which sections need the most assistance, urgently.UNICEF, along with many national and international level organisations, is already working with governments to finance programmes that focus on ending child poverty.
3. Building global, regional and national partnerships to end child poverty is a must. The UNICEF partners with many such organisations to monitor SDG1 child poverty indicators, helps develop global data on child poverty, promotes evidence-based advocacy, and convenes with partners to accelerate and coordinate child poverty elimination efforts.
Cover Credits
CEO and Editor-in-Chief: Tanya Chaitanya
Photographer: Harish Iyer
Art Director: Sameer More
Editorial Support: Shreya Goswami