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Child Poverty
Globally, around 600 million children live in extreme poverty. When families don’t have enough money they cannot invest in their children – such as buy food or clothes. Neither can they afford to take their children to see a doctor when they get sick or to keep them in school.
Furthermore, when already poor families are hit by unexpected shocks – such as drought, earthquakes, increased food prices, death of livestock, or conflict – their livelihoods suffer but it is children that suffer most as families are often forced to pull them out of school to work.
Even though it is the children who are suffering most from poverty’s effects, child poverty is often missing from overall national strategies for poverty reduction. Save the Children wants the world to put children and young people at the heart of its action to reduce poverty; to strengthen the low and insecure incomes that prevent children from surviving, learning and being protected; and thereby stop the transmission of poverty to future generations.
In 2018 the Child Poverty global theme launched three organisation wide common approaches driving forward our best work and best thinking to ensure we achieve more for children in more places across the world. Our common understanding is helping to ensure best programming for new born age upwards. We work to provide cash plus for better nutrition of children in the first 1000 days of life; we work to strengthened understanding of family economic situations to determine if households have the food and cash they need to survive and prosper; and we work to ensure young people acquire the core life skills to identify and capitalise on decent life and work opportunities in the future.
Save the Children works with partners and governments and directly with families and children to reduce the numbers of girls and boys in extreme poverty and seeks to increase young people’s hopes and skills for better lives.
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A Catalogue of Common Approaches: Delivering our best work for children
This catalogue showcases the common approaches that Save the Children currently has and those that are in the pipeline for 2018. Each approach addresses a particular problem – such as how to help children read and write; how to keep them safe in their own
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Graduating Out of Extreme Poverty: Who, why, and how? Evidence from Save the Children's Shiree Programme in Bangladesh
Typically led by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), graduation programmes consist of targeting poor households with a combination of layered and sequenced interventions, often over a defined period of time, in order to facilitate the achievement of str
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Child Sensitive Indicators for Poverty Alleviation Programming
Poverty alleviation is a crucial component to achieving Save the Children's global strategy of child survival, learning, and protection from violence. While many studies suggest that economic strengthening programmes can lead to many benefits to children
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Child Outcomes of Cash Transfer Programming: A synthesis of the evidence around survival, education, and protection in humanitarian and non-humanitarian contexts
The use of cash transfer programmes (CTP) has risen in recent years to become an integral element of poverty reduction and social protection strategies in the developing world. The humanitarian sector has more lately adopted CTP and within the past decade
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"Cash Plus" Programmes for Children
This paper provides a resource on "Cash Plus" interventions for children. These interventions combine household cash transfers with complementary, context-relevant interventionsn in order to address the multiple drivers of childhood deprivations and gener
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Child Poverty Humanitarian Strategic Framework
Since its inception in 2014, the Child Poverty Global Theme has been developing a strategic plan which aims at strengthening the economic dimension of Save the Children's programming across our breakthroughs of survival, learning, and protection. The appl
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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 p
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How Families Cope With Poverty in Asia: Lessons from a multi-country review of Household Economy Analysis and Cost of the Diet Assessments, 2011-15
In order to understand better the food security and livelihoods challenges in Asia, and how these relate to undernutrition and broader child wellbeing, Save the Children has conducted a retrospective synthesis review of its analyses in the region. This re
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Child Poverty and Adolescent Transitions
Adolescence is a time of vulnerability, but also a great window of opportunity. Governments should seize this time in order to address, and eventually eliminate, child poverty and move closer to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Addressing chil
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Mobile Money in Liberia: Save the Children's lessons learned
Learn how Save the Children used mobile money for emergency assistance to 5,000 households affected by Ebola in Liberia. Speakers share insights including the importance of the banking sector to mobile money humanitarian programs, consider the role of sup
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Child-sensitive Social Protection Briefing Paper
Child-sensitive Social Protection (CSSP) is an approach to social protection to realize the rights of children. CSSP helps families cope with chronic poverty, stresses, and shocks, and enables them to invest on an adequate and continuing basis in their ch
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How Markets Alleviated the Impact of Ebola for Vulnerable Families and Children
Soon after the Ebola outbreak was confirmed in Guinea, it quickly spread to the neighbouring countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Kailahun district of Sierra Leone, an important trading zone where the three nations converge, was hit especially hard