This paper presents and discusses different concepts of child poverty, alternative definitions of children living in poverty, and measurement efforts in this regard. It addresses such questions as: who are the children living in poverty? Is the issue of children living in poverty recognized by and incorporated into anti-poverty strategies? Have governments, civil society organizations and international organizations identified and adopted policies to reduce child poverty? And is the situation of girls living in poverty taken into account? Several organizations have recently adopted human rights-based approaches to defining children living in poverty, and these definitions are included here. In general, however, the assessment finds that there is a lack of consideration of children’s issues in the debate on poverty. The lack of visibility has negative implications for anti-poverty strategies, which seldom consider that children and their rights are central to their design and implementation. In this paper, we argue that the lack of conceptualization and debate on the specificities of child poverty has enormous consequences for policy and, vice versa, that the income generation and sectoral focus of poverty reduction policies discourages a holistic response to children and families.

The authors advise to hasten slowly in defining the successor framework to the MDGs. The review of progress in 2010 should not be intermingled with the intergovernmental discussions about the post-2015 framework. The latter should not start until a UN panel of Eminent Persons has prepared a set of thoughtful options and suggestions. The worst decision would be to keep the same MDGs and add new Goals and more Targets. The panel will have to address the following topics: (a) new structure; (b) new Targets; (c) collective nature of global Targets; (d) type of benchmarks; (e) new time horizon; and (f) disaggregated monitoring. The world will miss the MDGs largely because disparities within the majority of countries have grown to the point of slowing down national progress. In order to overcome the 'tyranny of averages', this article proposes a method of incorporating equity in national statistics.

child poverty, child rights, child well-being, children, poverty, poverty measurement,

In parallel to the substantial expansion in global economic transactions and growth during the 1990s, there is evidence that the number of poor has increased and that income disparity among and within countries grew as well. There is, however, considerably less evidence about the situation of children related to these matters. Within this context, this paper explores the evolution of social disparities by analysing the trends in the Under-5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) by wealth level. It is common knowledge that child mortality is higher among the poorest than the richest. However, the size of this mortality gap or the way it varies in relation to the absolute level of child mortality is not as well known. This paper shows, based on a sample of 24 developing countries with comparable surveys, that the U5MR of the bottom quintile of the distribution of wealth is, on average, 2.2 times bigger than that of the wealthiest quintile. This means that, taking into account the greater fertility of poorer households, a child from a family belonging to the bottom quintile of the wealth distribution is three times more likely to die before age 5 than a child belonging to the top quintile. The trends over time show that U5MR differentials remained constant over time in a few countries, but worsened in the majority of them. Only two countries with relatively small populations were able to achieve both a reduction in average U5MR and a decline of U5MR disparities. The implications of this finding for achieving the U5MR Millennium Development Goal is discussed. Under the top-down approach, extrapolating past trends, only six of the 24 countries would reach the goal. However, under the egalitarian approach, 16 of them would attain the two-thirds required reduction. The relation between changes in U5MR differentials and changes in income inequality does not seem to be pronounced, thus suggesting that social policy may play an important role in reducing U5MR disparity.Children, Mortality, Poverty, Under-5 Mortality Rate, Fertility,

The MDGs and other development initiatives must become more comprehensive and explicit in their analysis and tracking of inequities. The design of policies to narrow health gaps must take into account country-specific inequities.