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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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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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World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior
Published by the World Bank Group, this publication aims to integrate recent findings on the psychological and social underpinnings of behavior to make them available for systematic use by both researchers and practitioners in development communities. Equ
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Outcomes for Children from Household Economic Strengthening Interventions: A research synthesis
Traditionally, Economic Strengthening (ES) programmes have focused on the head of the household and were designed on the assumption that any benefits would trickle down to other members of the household including children. Despite this assumption, the imp
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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
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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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Impact of Cash and Asset Transfers on Child and Forced Marriage
This rapid review research report examines the impacts of cash and asset transfers on child and forced marriage. It identifies literature on the impacts of cash and asset transfer programmes on child and forced marriage. It attempts to identify key actors
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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
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Key Findings from the YouthSave Project
YouthSave is a consortium project led by Save the Children in partnership with the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, New America, CGAP, and supported by the MasterCard Foundation. The YouthSave consortium and local partn
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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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Money Matters: Training young workers of tomorrow in Indonesia
Youth unemployment is increasingly linked to low skills and inadequate preparation for the labor market. Vocational training programs are an important tool for young people to invest in the skills they need to compete for jobs. These programs have led to
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Cash Transfer Programmes in Sierra Leone
The humanitarian community is increasingly using cash-based and cash transfer programs (CTP) in response to emergencies world-wide. Many questions arise in regards to the use of this relief method. Primarily, (1) how do practitioners know that the resourc
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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