Publications

With children making up an estimated one third of internet users worldwide, living in the ‘digital age’ can have important implications for children’s lives. Currently, close to 80 per cent of people in Europe, North America and Australia have internet access, compared with less than 25 per cent in some parts of Africa and South Asia. The international community has recognized the importance of internet access for development, economic growth and the realization of civil rights and is actively seeking ways to ensure universal internet access to all segments of society. Children should be an important part of this process, not only because they represent a substantial percentage of internet users but also because they play an important part in shaping the internet. The internet in turn plays an important part in shaping children’s lives, culture and identities.

This paper finds that rural-urban migrant households have fewer assets, live in worse housing conditions and in areas less well served by public schools, have fewer social connections in the area where they live, and contain adults with lower educational levels than for urban native households. Even conditional on these household characteristics, educational expenditure and grade attainment were both lower for children from migrant households than urban natives. The findings are consistent with migrant children’s education being impeded by bureaucratic obstacles such as the household registration system in Vietnam.

Children living in urban slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh, often have poor access to school and attend different types of school than students from middle class households. This paper asks whether their experiences in school also disadvantage them further in terms of their learning outcomes and the likelihood of dropping out. It is based on interviews with 36 students aged 11-16 from both slum and middle-class backgrounds, in 2012. The paper discusses how these experiences in school are likely to heighten the risk of dropping out for slum students, analyses the results in terms of de-facto privatization and school accountability, and recommends better regulation of private tuition, and teaching styles that are less obsessed with examination results.

This paper demonstrates a better understanding of childhood poverty and education in relation to the theoretical perspective through drawing together empirical evidence, summarising and interpreting it, in a more integrated manner and context. On the basis of this examination of the phenomenon, research findings have translated into recommendations for policy and practice to improve formal secondary schooling for socio-economically disadvantaged children in Bangladesh.

Social protection is particularly important for children, in view of their higher levels of vulnerability compared to adults, and the role that social protection can play in ensuring adequate nutrition, access to and utilization of social services. While existing evidence shows that social protection programmes successfully address several dimensions of child well-being -often in an indirect way - a move towards a more "child sensitive" approach to social protection has recently been advocated at the highest level in the international development community.

Burkina Faso’s hard earned economic gains in recent years have been eroded by the 2008-09 world financial and economic crisis. The country will particularly feel the effects of the world economic crisis due to its close links with the world economy. Most of the adverse effects are transmitted to households then passed onto children. The situation of children principally depends on the monetary and non-monetary wellbeing of their household. This, together with their greater vulnerability, means that children are at risk of suffering more, and for longer, from the impacts of the crisis. It is therefore crucial to understand and anticipate the effects that the crisis may have on children in Burkina Faso and to propose options for social protection to counter these effects. To this end, we propose a macro-micro economic approach. Macro-micro economic analysis uses a general calculable equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the impacts of various transmission channels of the crisis to the Burkinabe economy. The results of these simulations are then used for the micro-econometric analysis, which integrates individual and household economic behaviour to evaluate the impact of the crisis on child welfare. A monetary transfer policy targeting poor children appears to be the most effective at reversing the negative effects of the crisis and returning to the trend that would have existed without the crisis. Such a policy, financed by external aid and with a budget of 1% of GDP, re-establishes the trend that monetary poverty would have followed in the absence of a crisis and even leads to a reduction in hunger. It also limits the crisis’ adverse effects on school enrolment, child labour and sick children’s access to modern health care services. A universal (non-targeted) variant of this transfer policy for 0-5 year-olds has similar results and is easier to enact. Policies which subsidize food and cereals, as well as monetary transfer policies for the Centre and Mouhoun regions (the areas most affected by the August-September 2009 floods) were also analyzed.

Social Monitor 2002 reviews recent socio-economic developments in the 27 countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. It contains three articles: Social trends in transition: an update on trends in a range of topics including income and poverty, fertility, infant and adult mortality, enrolment in education and care of children at risk. HIV/AIDS and young people: awareness, behaviour and policy: focuses on the spread of HIV, and young people’s knowledge about HIV prevention. Quality of learning: towards "unilateral educational disarmament"?: examines new information to compare learning outcomes in transition countries and in the West. In addition, the Statistical Annex covers a range of indicators for the years 1989 to 2000-2001, as well as comprehensive statistical profiles on each country in the region. Social Monitor 2002 builds on the eight Regional Monitoring Reports produced by the MONEE Project at the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre between 1993 and 2001.

This new report from the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre considers the effectiveness of public education systems across the rich nations of the industrialised world. The Report Card takes an overview of several well-respected cross-national surveys into educational performance in an effort to present a “big picture” of the extent of educational disadvantage in OECD member countries. Although enrolment rates in lower secondary schooling throughout the OECD are almost 100 per cent, children in their early teens nevertheless differ greatly in what they successfully manage to learn while at school. With the importance of knowledge and of “human capital” in the global economy, the differences between high and low achievers become ever more critical if a part of each generation is not to be excluded from the benefits of economic progress.

Germany ranks lowest regarding educational equalities among OECD countries, as the recently published PISA ‘Programme of International Student Assessment’ data revealed (ref. PISA 2000). This might be due to the remarkable German transition process from primary to secondary school where children are selected into diversely prestigious school environments at an early stage of their intellectual development. This paper aims at examining whether sorting of children is leading to educational inequalities. Based on the two different surveys of learning achievement TIMSS (‘Third International Math and Science Study’) and PISA 2000 we find consistently that although ability is a main criterion of the sorting process, pupils' socio-economic background, their gender and the region they live in also exert a significant influence on the selection results. Since sorting is difficult to correct and school choice determines career options, these educational inequalities in secondary schooling very probably have an impact on pupils’ life even long after they have finished school.

Questo nuovo rapporto del Centro di Ricerca Innocenti dell'UNICEF riguarda l'efficenza del sistema di istruzione pubblica nei paesi economicamente avanzati. Il rapporto utilizza dati tratti da indagini sul rendimento scolastico degli studenti nel tentativo di elaborare un quadro generale sullo svantaggio educativo nei paesi dell'OCSE. Sebbene il tasso di iscrizione alla istruzione secondaria inferiore nell'OCSE sia del 100 percento, i giovani nei primi anni dellla loro adolescenza differiscono notevolmente in termini di apprendimento scolastico. Data l'importanza della conoscenza e del capitale umano in un'economia globalizzata, le disuguaglianze nell'apprendimento scolastico diventano decisive se non si vuole correre il rischio che una parte della popolazione venga esclusa dai benefici del progresso economico.

Progress towards the target of universal access to basic education by the year 2000, set by two global conferences in 1990, has been too slow in many countries. Most of the reasons for this inadequate progress are country-specific. However, in virtually all countries one explanation stands out: inadequate public finance for primary education. This paper updates the global and regional cost estimates for achieving 'education for all' by 2015 the new target date set by the Social Summit in 1995. The estimates are based on the most recent country-by-country data on budgetary expenditure, population and enrolment trends, and unit cost.

The Two Faces of Education in Ethnic Conflict challenges a widely-held assumption - that education is inevitably a force for good. While stressing the many stabilizing aspects of good quality education, editors Kenneth Bush and Diana Saltarelli show how education can be manipulated to drive a wedge between people, rather than drawing them closer together. After analyzing the increasing importance of ethnicity in contemporary conflicts, this Innocenti Insight outlines the negative and positive faces of education in situations of tension or violence, including the denial of education as a weapon of war (negative) and the cultivation of inclusive citizenship (positive). It emphasizes the need for peacebuilding education that goes further than the 'add good education and stir' approach, aiming to transform the very foundations of intolerance.