END CHILD POVERTY
Breaking the cycle
The threat to childhood from poverty, ill health and deprivation is multifaceted. The response has to be similarly all-embracing. What is needed is an integrated approach to childhood that will greatly improve the chances that every child will both survive and thrive.
Monitor and analyse budgets
The monitoring and analysis of national budgets from the perspective of their impact on children is a promising approach to promoting increased resource allocation for children and maximising its effective use. These include better targeting of education, health and social assistance services towards the poor, addressing government-related impediments to service quality and effectiveness, increasing community participation, and scaling up on the basis of successful programs.
Spend more on families
Evidence underlines the importance of developing locally owned and designed interventions based on sound locally-situated and gender-sensitive analyses, rather than on a ‘one-size fits all’ agendas. Without a good understanding of the local family context, for example, health or education interventions focused on children may fail to deliver the desired results.
Ensure gender equality
Pursuing labour market and fiscal policies that address economic insecurity among women and reduce persistently high levels of inequality can help reduce poverty. Steady economic growth matched by growing employment rates among women (and among single parents) has contributed to reducing child poverty in the 1990s in a number of OECD countries.
Strengthen the protective environment
Developing legislation and local initiatives to fortify the protective environment for children will result in both economic development and the fulfilment of child rights. A study by the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour offers convincing evidence that over a 20-year period, the economic benefits of eliminating child labour would far exceed the costs.
Children themselves help us understand what child poverty means. In Serbia and Montenegro, a country impoverished by more than a decade of strife, inter-ethnic tension and economic crisis, UNICEF has been working with the government and local NGOs on a participatory study of child poverty that has made a point of consulting children as well as their parents. As one participating child said: “Finally someone has remembered to ask how we feel about all this.”