Building Strong Foundations for Later Livelihoods by Addressing Child Poverty
BOOK CHAPTER by Paul Dornan and Kirrily Pells, in "Enterprise Development and Microfinance" (26.2: 90-103)
Improving children's life chances is central to development in low- and middle-income countries. Half the population of sub-Saharan Africa are aged 18 or younger, and young people comprise nearly half of all people living in extreme poverty worldwide.
Poverty undermines not only children's rights to life, survival, and development, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but also the skills and capabilities that fast-changing economies need for future growth. By extension, given poverty is a key mechanism shaping later chances, eradicating it is key to improving equality of opportunity.
Young Lives is following the lives of 12,000 children growing up in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. In this article Paul Dornan and Kirrily Pells presents longitudinal analysis on inequities in children's development trajectories, drawing on data from the Young Lives cohort study. The central questions discussed are how, why, and when inequalities become established through childhood, and how policy interventions at different stages of the early life-course can mitigate the development of such inequalities.
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