You are here
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.
-
Doing More, Doing Better: Social Protection for Adolescent Girls
This story shows the process of how to better include adolescent girls in the existing social protection framework in Bangladesh. Through evidence-based strategic advocacy, Save the Children has tried to better link with social protection systems and stru
-
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
-
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
-
Intra-Household Inequalities in Child Rights and Wellbeing: A barrier to progress?
This paper attempts to measure the extent of inequality between boys and girls within households and its contribution to overall levels of inequality in child wellbeing. Without better knowledge of this area, our view of progress towards eliminating child
-
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
-
Progress for Children Beyond Averages: Learning from the MDGs (No. 11)
This publication, through the use of UNICEF data, explores the progress and disparities for children after the arrival of the end date for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The analysis provides a range of outcomes: although a child’s chance to sur
-
Rethinking Parenting for Economic Migrants in East Africa: Corporate social responsibility perspectives
Economic migration, migration on the grounds of employment or financial stability, continues to play a key role for households in East Africa. With a specific focus on the private sector in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda this report focuses on four issues: the
-
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
-
The Ghana Experiment: Overview of the findings
The Ghana Experiment in YouthSave is a large-scale, rigorous test of the impacts of youth savings accounts (YSAs) on savings performance and developmental outcomes for youth and their households. The Center for Social Development (CSD), in partnership wit
-
Rio Stories
In Rio Stories you meet five young people living in the favela Maré in Rio de Janeiro. Children growing up in Maré face high levels of poverty, limited public services, social and economic exclusion and human rights abuses. Maré has suffered decades of dr
-
Child Rights Situation Analysis: Vietnam Country Office 2014
Vietnam has made impressive socio-economic development progress between late 1990s and 2000s. From a planned centralized economy based on public ownership, to a multi-sector economy based on the market, Vietnam was transformed with an average annual growt
-
WINGS 2014: The World of India's Girls
WINGS 2014, The World of India’s Girls, depicts the challenges facing girls, young women, and fully grown women in today’s India. The report describes how, despite economic growth and social development, girls face unequal challenges in Indian society. Th