Children at the margins
The early 2020s have been shaped by ‘polycrisis’ – global public health crises, climate disasters, political and economic instability – which has reversed or stalled decades of progress in human development, and which has disproportionately affected children. Children are at least twice as likely as adults to live in poverty, and even brief instances of hardship in a child’s life can have lifelong developmental consequences. Although poverty is traditionally measured using monetary methods, these measures often miss what is most important for children. Child poverty is different from adult poverty because children lack agency and rely on public goods, such as schools and health clinics, and a child whose household may not be counted as income-poor can still lack access to adequate food, safe drinking water, shelter, schooling, or healthcare, among other essential resources. This thesis examines child poverty, vulnerability, and exclusion across different low- and middle-income contexts, revealing how 1) measurement choices determine who is considered poor; 2) interconnected and overlapping deprivations can reinforce each other and harm children’s development; 3) early, integrated and context-specific interventions are necessary to protect vulnerable children and safeguard their lifelong potential. It does this through four separate but interconnected research papers, and using large, nationally representative household survey datasets. The first assesses three multidimensional poverty measurement frameworks, and how they each identify different shares of children as poor in Uganda, demonstrating how technical and conceptual measurement choices are crucial in deciding who is identified as poor. The second investigates how overlapping deprivations in essential dimensions like nutrition, health, sanitation, water and housing are associated with child stunting (a signifier of a child’s physical growth being held back over a long period of time) among children in Cambodia, showing that children who faced fewer than three deprivations were significantly less likely to be stunted. The third investigates the relationship between maternal educational achievement and the extent to which it protects against child stunting across fourteen Sub-Saharan African countries, finding that when the mother achieved higher levels of schooling, children generally were less likely to be stunted, but other deprivations, as well as intergenerational, biological and contextual factors, also mattered. The last study examines how disability intersects with other disadvantages such as rurality and poverty in Viet Nam, to create barriers to school completion, digital access, and overall child well-being. The research suggests that policies aiming to break intergenerational cycles of poverty should holistically support children across all dimensions of their well-being, instead of addressing only one need at a time, and be implemented early in their life and adapted to their needs across different ages. Policies should also be adapted to the local conditions, instead of applying “one-size-fits-all” metrics. Evidence to inform policies should also be based on measurement tools that are chosen carefully and whose choices and limitations are stated openly, because the answer to the question, “which children are poor?”, depends on these choices. Inclusive future research and policy design should consider longitudinal and qualitative lenses, and treat vulnerable children with dignity and empathy, ensuring that applied frameworks actively remove the structural, environmental, and social barriers that keep them excluded.