Publications

The war in Ukraine triggered an economic shock in countries in Eastern and Central Asia, a region that has been visited by multiple economic shocks in the past decades. For the children and families The shock featured a spike in the prices of commodities including food and fuel. As a result, poor families who spend a greater proportion of their incomes on necessities – such as food and fuel – were the hardest hit. The result was greater risk of poverty, weakened school attachment and increased infant mortality, among others.

This UNICEF Innocenti Research Brief shares projections about the fallout of this crisis on poverty, schooling, infant mortality and the purchasing power of families. It also reviews the social protections put in place in response to the crisis and makes recommendation for future social protection responses.

Children and families throughout the European Union are facing a cost-of-living crisis that has eroded living standards to such an extent that up to an additional 3 million children in 26 EU countries are now living in conditions equivalent to relative income poverty.

For families and children in the EU, the cost-of-living crisis is being experienced primarily through higher prices for food and energy. In addition, increasing interest rates make borrowing less affordable, placing a growing strain on the sustainability of businesses, mortgages, loans and government debt.

This research brief presents the first results of an analysis of how the cost-of-living crisis has affected the poverty experienced by households with children in the European Union (EU). It takes account of sharply increasing food and energy prices to calculate the additional number of children living in poverty, in real terms, due to the crisis. The brief also recommends that policymakers and governments protect children and families with steps that include expanding and index-linking child cash benefits to cover the needs of families, implementing guarantees to provide free meals for children in schools and providing services that prevent ‘holiday hunger’ when schools are closed in the summer months.

This report is a first attempt to inform the development of comprehensive and integrated child policy portfolios globally, by mapping and reviewing how much public money is spent on children, how it is spent across different sectors, and if in the life course it is spent evenly across all countries with usable data. The report builds on previous work that was limited to high-income countries (OECD, 2009, 2011, 2023). Given the overwhelming evidence of the importance of early childhood development, this report focuses in particular on the patterns of expenditure choices on these earliest years. The purpose of this work is to assess how systems work for the average child with the aim of informing policymakers and stakeholders about adequacy, balance and coherence in the public policy portfolio for children.

Underinvestment in children – in good times or bad – is a slow-burning and fundamental crisis for development, and needs to be addressed with as equal urgency as conflict, COVID-19 and climate breakdown. Coordinated and corrective action is needed from development stakeholders and in domestic child policies now, if countries are to meet their obligations to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and make good on the promises of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Millions of children around the world, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, live in households that receive money and other forms of support from a family member who has moved abroad, or to another part of the same country, to work. This form of assistance, or ‘remittances’, can alleviate household poverty and is often a key support for children’s development. In times of global economic uncertainty, however, remittances can be an unstable source of income for families. The COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting migrant workers’ job security, making it more difficult to send remittances. At the same time, families receiving remittances are facing their own economic and health challenges, meaning that the continuation of remittances is vital to keep them from slipping into poverty. This briefing paper outlines the potential risks of reduction in remittances due to the pandemic for children in households receiving remittances and what can be done to minimize these risks.

Shocks can pressure families into negative coping strategies with significant drawbacks for children’s lives and development, particularly for children living in disadvantaged households who are at greater risk of falling into a poverty trap. This paper investigates if unconditional cash transfers can be effective in protecting children against unexpected negative life events. Using two waves of data, we found that the Lesotho Child Grant Programme reduced the incidence and intensity of multidimensional deprivation for children living in labour-constrained female-headed households that experienced negative economic or demographic shocks. Programme design in shock-prone contexts should seek to reinforce and widen the protective effect of the cash transfer for the most vulnerable.

What difference does a dollar a day make? For the poorest households in Jordan, many of whom escaped conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic, UNICEF Jordan’s Hajati humanitarian cash transfer programme helps them keep their children in school, fed and clothed – all for less than one dollar per day. In fact, cash transfers have the potential to touch on myriad of child and household well-being outcomes beyond food security and schooling.

This research brief compares the properties of individual- and household-based multidimensional child poverty approaches. Specifically, it contrasts UNICEF’s Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) with the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. MODA focuses on children and is rooted in the child rights approach, while MPI has been developed for households and follows Sen’s (1985) capabilities approach. We demonstrate their similarities and differences using two recent Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys: Sierra Leone and Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR). The analysis suggests that MODA tends to produce higher multidimensional child poverty headcount rates than MPI, both because of the differences in the survey items used to construct the indicators of deprivation and because of how the indicators are aggregated and weighted.

In 2018, significant gains were made in generating evidence to improve the lives of the most disadvantaged children, build organizational capacity to conduct and use quality, ethical research on children, and set a foundation as an important convening centre for expert consultation on next-generation ideas on children. 2018 marks the first year the UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti is reporting on the progress of research under the new UNICEF Strategic Plan (2018-2021). This plan is the first to clearly delineate the role of research and evidence as one of the eight priority change strategies for children. This report therefore is an account of the first year of work to generate critical evidence to inform programmes, policies and advocacy for children and young people around the world.

In this paper, we provide estimates and analysis of child multidimensional poverty in Mozambique. Drawing on data from the Mozambique Household Budget Survey of 2014/15 (IOF), we define child multidimensional poverty using the Multiple Overlapping Analysis (MODA). We define three age groups of children, and a total of seven dimensions of deprivation: Family, Nutrition, Education, Child  labour, Health, WASH, Participation, and Housing. Results show that 81 per cent of children are deprived in at least two dimensions. Children are especially vulnerable in rural areas, where deprivation rates reach 95 per cent, and in the provinces of Niassa, Zambezia, and Cabo Delgado. The dimensions that more frequently overlap in Mozambique are Housing, Health, and WASH, with one third of children being deprived in these three dimensions at the same time. The data also allow the analysis of the interplay between monetary and multidimensional child poverty: 46 per cent of children suffer both forms of poverty. Children who are poor and deprived are children who live in rural areas, in more remote provinces; they live in households whose heads are less educated and whose main activity is agriculture. Finally, there is a direct correlation with shocks affecting the household and multidimensional poverty, with children of families who experienced weather shocks being more likely to be poor, deprived, or both.

Our latest annual Results Report presents a review of the Office of Research - Innocenti’s top-line results delivered in 2017. It contains an excellent summary of how our research contributes to impact for children. Selected key results are highlighted for all research and capacity-building areas, while ‘deeper dive’ case studies provide in-depth narratives. The report also highlights capacity building, promotion of ethical research, and communications and operations milestones in 2017. Importantly, the report describes the Office of Research’s expanding role as a physical and virtual convening space for dialogue and critical thinking on issues concerning children and adolescents, in support of UNICEF’s new global Strategic Plan.

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Many OECD countries responded to the crisis by reducing social spending. Through 11 diverse country case studies (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States), this volume describes the evolution of child poverty and material well-being during the crisis, and links these outcomes with the responses by governments. The analysis underlines that countries with fragmented social protection systems were less able to protect the incomes of households with children at the time when unemployment soared. In contrast, countries with more comprehensive social protection cushioned the impact of the crisis on households with children, especially if they had implemented fiscal stimulus packages at the onset of the crisis. Although the macroeconomic 'shock' itself and the starting positions differed greatly across countries, while the responses by governments covered a very wide range of policy levers and varied with their circumstances, cuts in social spending and tax increases often played a major role in the impact that the crisis had on the living standards of families and children.

This Report Card offers an assessment of child well-being in the context of sustainable development across 41 countries of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Specifically, this report seeks to bring the SDG targets for children in high-income countries into meaningful operation (while staying true to the ambitions of the global agenda) and to establish a point of departure for reviewing the SDG framework in these contexts. It focuses on those goals and targets with most direct relevance to the well-being of children in high-income settings. Where appropriate, it adapts the agreed SDG indicator, the better to reflect the problems facing children in such countries. The results therefore highlight the new challenges set by the SDGs.