What works to reduce Child Poverty?

Global progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) child poverty targets of halving multidimensional child poverty and ending extreme child poverty remains alarmingly slow. Nearly 900 million children experience multidimensional poverty and over 300 million children struggle to survive on less than PPP $2.15 daily. At the higher international thresholds of PPP $3.65 and PPP $6.85, a staggering 829 million and 1.43 billion children, respectively, are living in poverty. Achieving the SDG child poverty targets will require extraordinary efforts, including learning from countries that have achieved substantial progress in tackling child poverty. This report focuses on these positive examples, exploring the policies, programmes and contextual factors driving child poverty reduction in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Peru, Poland, Senegal, and Tanzania – countries which have made significant progress in reducing child poverty in the past two decades. The aim of the report is to provide useful and practical advice for other countries and the international community to explore and implement effective policies to reduce child poverty.

This report was developed on behalf of the Global Coalition to End Child Poverty, led and authored by Charlotte Bilo, Solrun Engilbertsdottir, Enrique Delamónica (all UNICEF) and Oliver Fiala (Save the Children), who conducted the data analysis and synthesized the overall findings.