Using nationally defined and accepted poverty lines (i.e. the local cost of purchasing a minimum basket of good and services), poor households are identified. These are households that cannot afford this basket (i.e. their income or consumption, depending what is used at the country level) is not sufficient to surpass the poverty line. The percentage of children (out of all children in the country) living in those households are the percentage of children living in monetary poor households.

The data come from UNICEF’s Country Reporting on Indicators for the Goals (CRING), 2016–2017, and do not represent the full extent of available data on child poverty using poverty lines that exist at the
national level. For the SDG thematic report, the 49 countries reporting data to CRING have been classified as having ‘insufficient trend data’, while all others have been assigned to ‘no data’ – although many countries do have data (and have long trends in data) but are not currently included in CRING.

In addition to reflecting very different national methodologies, this indicator – which refers to the population as a whole – has been modified to be specific to children. Data on this child-specific formulation of the indicator is not publicly available in the SDG Global Database.