Tracking Disparities: Who Gets Left Behind? Initial findings from Peru

This report presents initial findings from the third round of data collection by Young Lives in Peru, carried out from late 2009 to early 2010 with two age cohorts of children. It gives a broad outline of some of the key indicators of childhood poverty and changes that have taken place in the children’s lives between the earlier rounds of data collection in 2002 and 2006 and this third round. Data are mainly presented for the entire age cohort, in most cases separated into gender, wealth groups, rural/urban location, and maternal mother tongue (as a proxy of ethnicity). In particular, we are able to make comparisons between the older children at age 8 in 2002 (in Round 1), and the younger cohort at age 8 in 2009 (Round 3) – to highlight changes that have happened in the study communities over that time.
In recent years Peru has had consistent achievements in the economic, social and political arenas, but still faces important challenges. These achievements are consistent economic growth, the development of programmes and policies to fight poverty, and the maintenance of democracy; the challenges are a large (but decreasing) poor population, a high degree of inequality in social opportunities and outcomes, and a decentralisation process which started in 2002 in the hope that it would bring government closer to people’s needs, but still needs to be strengthened. Peru currently faces the enormous challenge of making its impressive economic growth more inclusive, so that the inequalities in opportunities and outcomes that are currently so closely linked to area of residence, ethnicity, maternal education, poverty and in some cases gender diminish over time through concerted policies and programmes.