Children and poverty

The 50-strong team, led by social anthropologist Jo Boyden, is investigating the lives of 12,000 children growing up in four developing countries over 15 years. The study countries – Ethiopia, India, Vietnam and Peru – were selected to reflect a wide range of cultural, political, geographical and social contexts. And while Peru, Vietnam and to a large extent India have all been experiencing economic growth in recent years, and three consecutive good harvests give cause for hope in Ethiopia, in each case huge inequalities exist and children continue to die of easily preventable diseases. Young Lives has set out to understand why childhood poverty persists and how it affects children’s lives, and to provide the kind of evidence needed for the development of effective solutions.

The research is unique in the way it integrates regular questionnaire-based surveys of all the children and their carers every 3 years with more in-depth work using participatory methods with selected children, including monitoring relevant government policies, budgets and actual spending on services such as health and education at community level.

"Nothing quite like Young Lives has ever been carried out as a longitudinal study, particularly one involving the long-term participation of poorer communities in developing countries. We are not just trying to measure poverty and create statistics, we’re looking at changes over time, how and why these happen, and what they mean for poor children and their families.”

As Dr Boyden points out, standard poverty indicators such as child survival rates and education enrolment are improving globally, especially in urban areas. “The task now”, she argues, “is to find ways to tackle persistent poverty and reach the poorest individuals and groups who are being left behind as living standards rise.” The kind of detailed information and in-depth understanding  that Young Lives can offer to help governments (and donor agencies) make real changes is what will make all the difference now.

At the same time, making new kinds of information available won’t in itself win the day. “Getting children and their specific needs on the agenda and into policy debates and programmes is still in its early stages,” she adds. “Too often, children are just considered as ‘beneficiaries’ of health or education programmes, or their needs are overlooked when policies are targeted at adults and families. But children are individuals in their own right, with their own hope and aspirations, needs and resilience. This is what we want to bring home to policymakers and local politicians.”

The broad approach Young Lives takes to poverty should also make the research findings more useful. Traditionally, researchers have seen poverty primarily in terms of lack of income and material goods, or deprivations of education, health, hunger and protection. The Oxford programme is developing a holistic understanding of childhood poverty and its impacts, including on children’s social, emotional and psychological well-being.

Core-funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), Young Lives was conceived  as a Millennium project and established as a consortium involving the international aid agency Save the Children UK working with research institutions in the UK. The work was consolidated under the leadership of Oxford in 2005, when Dr Boyden took the helm, bringing in other colleagues from the university, including development economist Professor Stefan Dercon, whose insights on poverty in Africa and experience of working with panel data are invaluable. The work remains collaborative, with Professor Martin Woodhead of the Open University’s Child and Youth Studies Group and Dr Ginny Morrow from the Institute of Education in London playing key roles, along with leading national research and statistics institutions and policy specialists in the four study countries.

In fact, the way the programme works through its in-country teams is one of its key strengths. This offers the advantage of local knowledge of communities and the political context and means the researchers and policy staff are better placed to influence policy and bring about changes that can improve children’s lives. It embeds the work in each country so that it is more likely to be taken on board by key decision-makers.

Young Lives involves much careful work to ensure its research is rigorous, the data accurate and the analysis and policy recommendations realistic and based firmly on the evidence. But it goes beyond that. As Boyden concludes, “Our job is to ensure that we get children’s issues on the agenda, stimulate significant debate, and that we challenge and change policies and thinking on childhood poverty in the longer term.”

Young Lives is core-funded by the UK’s Department for International Development with sub-studies funded by IDRC (in Ethiopia), UNICEF (in India), Irish Aid (in Vietnam) and the Bernard van Leer Foundation.