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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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Social Protection for Children: Key policy trends and statistics
Published as an instalment of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Social Protection Policy Papers, this publication examines the case of social protection policies as an essential element of realizing children’s rights, ensuring their well-being
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Child Sensitive Social Protection: Addressing child poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Child Sensitive Social Protection is an initiative that Save the Children and The Africa Platform for Social Protection (APSP) want to advance in Sub-Saharan Africa with the aim to reduce vulnerability and poverty among children by ensuring that social pr
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Using Mobile Money Payments for Cash Transfers: Save the Children and Econet
This is a webinar on Save the Children and Econet’s partnership in Zimbabwe. The aim of the programme was to distribute cash transfers electronically through mobile money services. The presentation covers each partner’s contribution, the benefits of digit
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Impact of Multipupose Cash Assistance on Outcomes for Children in Lebanon: Improving cash-based interventions, multipurpose cash grants and protection
This report examines the impact of multi-purpose cash assistance on children, specifically looking at child outcomes and child protection outcomes, in Lebanon. The impact of the Lebanon Cash Consortium MCA program was measured using a variety of indicator
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Toward Financially Capable Youth: Insights from YouthSave's financial education
As part of the YouthSave project, Save the Children carried out financial education activities in Colombia, Kenya, and Nepal to teach adolescent youth how to make the best use of their savings accounts and about sound personal financial management. Save t
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Digital Payments: Save time, save costs, save lives
This article reviews how mobile technologies can assist humanitarian organizations in overcoming an array of logistical challenges, to make crisis relief possible for children and families in vulnerable situations. In Yemen, Save the Children partnered wi
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Child Poverty, Indicators to Measure Progress for the SDGs
The Sustainable Development Goals explicitly include a target to halve child poverty by 2030. Assembled by a coalition of partners to end child poverty, this brief puts forth specific indicators for measuring each of the two sub-goals of the target: Targe
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Barnfattigdom i Sverige: Årsrapport 2015
Save the Children Sweden releases its thirteenth annual report on child poverty in Sweden. This report, based on data from 2013, shows that child poverty in Sweden is unchanged at 12%, compared with 2012. Children from single parent households and childre
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Forgotten Voices: The world of urban children in India
This report discusses how the major urban development schemes in India do not adequately take into account issues related to children’s health, education, growth, safety and participation. The rising urbanisation in India presents an opportunity to design
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Working Children in Bangladesh: Inspiring stories from the field
Working children in Bangladesh are denied access to basic services such as education, health, nutrition and other child development services, which subsequently lead to inter-generational transfer of poverty. Further, prevalence of high levels of violence
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Child Sensitive Social Protection in Dungarpur
Dungarpur, located in the southernmost tip of the state of Rajasthan in western India, presents an alarming picture of child poverty and vulnerability alongside poor child development indicators. Most households in the district are excluded from the benef
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Putting Child Sensitive Social Protection into Practice in Nepal
Child Sensitive Social Protection (CSSP) is a Save the Children initiative in South Asia aiming to reduce vulnerability and poverty of children by ensuring that social protection measures lead to meaningful investment in children. Currently the programme