Child Sensitivity in Poverty Alleviation Programming: An analytical toolkit

Child-sensitive policies, programmes and interventions explicitly aim to maximize the benefits for children and minimize any harm. However, increasing income and assets at the household level does not always result in positive impacts for children. Some poverty alleviation (PA) interventions can have neutral or unintended negative impacts on children.

Therefore, a child-sensitive approach to PA programming is needed to ensure that PA programmes target children and truly lead to positive benefits for them, and most importantly, to ensure that PA programmes cause no harm to children.

The purpose of this toolkit is to present practical guidance to help project teams ensure that poverty alleviation programmes are child-sensitive (i.e. maximize benefits for children and eliminate harm to children). This involves using child-sensitive approaches in the design, implementation, monitoring and/or evaluation phases of PA projects whenever possible.

Additionally, this toolkit leverages Save the Children’s expertise, knowledge, skills and experience in designing and implementing PA programming (e.g. food security and hunger, livelihoods, social protection, humanitarian cash/resource transfers) that is child-sensitive by consolidating and presenting relevant tools and resources that already exist.