Publications

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.

Unconditional cash transfers are on the rise in Sub-Saharan Africa, with recent estimates indicating a doubling of programmes between 2010 and 2014. This brief provides an overview of the comprehensive impacts across eight domains of two unconditional cash transfer programmes implemented by the Zambian Government: The Child Grant Programme (CGP) and the Multiple Category Targeting Programme (MCP). Although the primary objective of these programmes is poverty mitigation rather than economic empowerment, we document protective and productive outcomes in order to assess whether these programmes generate transformative effects and have the potential to offer a sustained pathway out of poverty for poor households.

 

Approximately half of all mental health disorders begin by age 14, and three-quarters by age 24. Among adolescents, depression is one of the leading contributors to morbidity, while suicide and interpersonal violence are among the leading causes of mortality. Mental ill-health also reinforces poverty through decreased productivity and loss of earnings, increased health expenditures, and social stigma. Since the evidence on the effects of poverty-alleviation programmes on mental health have been inconclusive, there is a need for research on specific poverty-alleviation interventions for vulnerable groups who are more at risk for poor mental well-being.

This study investigates whether cash transfers enable households facing weather and other negative income shocks to avoid adverse coping strategies that can lead to poverty traps. While cash transfers are not routinely considered in the policy discourse concerning climate adaptation programming, because ex-ante transfers enable households to avoid negative coping strategies and even increase food consumption in the face of covariate weather shocks, cash transfers offer a sound approach for building climate-resilience amongst the world’s most vulnerable and facilitating their “autonomous adaptation” to a changing environment. Cash also enables households to productively cope with the many other idiosyncratic shocks the rural poor routinely face.

Poverty has serious consequences for children’s well-being as well as for their achievements in adult life. The Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis for the European Union (EU-MODA) compares the living conditions of children across the EU member states, plus Iceland and Norway. Rooted in the established multidimensional poverty measurement tradition, EU-MODA uses the international framework of child rights to inform the construction of indicators and dimensions essential to children’s material well-being, taking into account the needs of children at various stages of their life cycle. The study contributes to the literature on monetary child poverty and material deprivation in the EU by analysing several dimensions of child deprivation individually and simultaneously, constructing multidimensional deprivation indices, and studying the overlaps between monetary poverty and multidimensional deprivation.

Recent years have witnessed widespread acknowledgement in both academic and policy circles that children deserve a special focus in poverty measurement. It is now generally accepted that children have different basic needs from adults and are harder hit, both in the short- and long-term, when their basic needs are not met. The European Union (EU) has acknowledged the need for child-focused indicators in monitoring poverty and social exclusion and is currently in the process of developing, testing and comparing single indicators of child well-being across member states. This paper aims to add to this debate by providing a micro-analysis of the breadth of child poverty in the European Union, considering both the degree of overlap and accumulation of deprivations across monetary and multidimensional indicators of poverty. Using the 2007 wave of the EU-SILC data, the European Union (EU) monetary 'at-risk-of-poverty' indicator is compared with a range of child deprivation indicators at domain level in four EU Member States (Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom). Overall, the paper’s findings provide a strong call for the need to take a multidimensional approach towards the measurement of child poverty in the EU context.

Within the last decade governments of donors and developing countries have committed themselves to achieving a number of International Development Targets (IDTs) to be reached by 2015. These include halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and ensuring universal primary education. While the bulk of the resources for this task will come from the national budgets of developing countries, without additional official development assistance (ODA) the task is daunting for most of the low-income countries. This paper examines the extent to which poverty alleviation through support for basic social services has become part of the official development assistance strategy of donors. It finds an alarming gap between the rethoric of poverty reduction on the one hand, and the feature of ODA, especially to basic services, on the other.