Child poverty

In the eyes of a child, poverty is about more than just money. Very often children experience poverty as the lack of shelter, education, nutrition, water or health services. The lack of these basic needs often results in deficits that cannot easily be overcome later in life.  

In most countries, children make up between a third to almost half of the population. Unless child poverty is specifically monitored, policy makers may have the misconception that progress is being made to reduce poverty, when in reality a large proportion of the population could be stagnating or worse off. This could be the case if improvements in access to health care and literacy rates  are observed at the aggregate, national level while in reality, children are not taken to clinics and children are not going to school. 

A major step forward – driven by sustained NGO advocacy and collaboration with national statistical offices and government partners – is the explicit inclusion of multidimensional child poverty in the SDG framework as well as a specific metric in the reporting mechanism. This marks a shift toward measuring poverty based on children’s own experiences, rather than simply disaggregating household-level data. 

SDG 1.2.2 Proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions

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Measuring child poverty means measuring the experience of the whole child

Child poverty should be measured at the individual, child level, with all relevant dimensions assessed for the same child. While this poses some data challenges, traditional household surveys such as MICS and DHS typically provide the necessary information across all dimensions of child poverty. 

All children under the age of 18 should be included in total estimates. Where feasible, results should also be disaggregated by age groups – such as 0–5, 6–11, and 12–17 – while ensuring comparability across groups. Fortunately, available datasets support such analyses. This makes it possible and necessary to go beyond disaggregating household-level poverty by age and instead measure child poverty directly at the individual level. 

Multidimensional child poverty measurement should be based on deprivations in the fulfillment of child rights. However, not all rights should be included in the calculation of multidimensional child poverty. Only rights that fundamentally and directly require resources to be realized should be included – these are referred to as rights constitutive of poverty. Monetary poverty – income insufficiency to maintain a minimum standard of living (which is a basic human right) – should be analyzed separately due to its distinct nature. Children are not expected to earn an income, and monetary poverty is typically measured at the household level, not for individual children. Moreover, multidimensional poverty and monetary poverty are different but complementary concepts – one does not replace the other. They are often interlinked: child poverty can be both a cause and consequence of household monetary poverty, and vice versa. Comparing child-level deprivations with household monetary status can therefore provide deeper insights into both immediate and long-term (intergenerational) poverty dynamics. 

Towards internationally comparable measures of child poverty

To assess child poverty across countries, a standardized measurement framework that uses the same parameters across countries is needed. The dimensions included reflect rights that are constitutive of poverty – that is, rights outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child which require periodic/continuous consumption or use of material resources for their fulfillment.  Indicators must be valid and reliable and available across a large number of countries. The thresholds used to determine deprivation for the indicators in each dimension are internationally agreed upon minima (for example, those established for the SDGs or the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene). In addition, each dimension includes both severe and moderate thresholds of deprivation. (See Table of Dimensions, Indicators, and Thresholds)  

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