Far too many children live in poverty, deprived of financial resources and essentials like schooling and sanitation. But child poverty is not inevitable. Countries have shown what is possible when they prioritize children. What we need now is commitment to implement proven strategies, to innovate as crises converge, and to keep an unwavering focus on the rights of every child.

This brief presents findings from the global MPI 2025, with a particular focus on children, offering evidence on the scale and distribution of children living in multidimensional poverty to inform targeted interventions and accelerate progress towards the SDGs.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the conceptualisation and the latest developments in research about child poverty and inequality. Adopting a child rights framework, it demonstrates the importance of a multi-dimensional understanding of poverty specific to children for both research and policy-making.

The Empathy Fix promises a radical rethink of poverty, taking the reader inside its lived experience, the latest efforts to combat it, and arming them with the information needed to enact lasting social change.

Noting that climate change and conflicts interact differently with each other depending on the context and thus have varying impacts on children, the study explores the nuanced relationship between conflict and climate change as it pertains to children in the Sahel region, and provides policy recommendations for action. The intention is to help put the CAAC agenda at the centre of climate discourse and action, and vice versa.

This paper provides a methodology for jointly analyzing individual disadvantages alongside household poverty status and composition. The illustration analyses deprivations in child nutrition and school attendance, and achievements of first generation learners, alongside multidimensional poverty status in seven South Asian countries, and monetary poverty status in Pakistan, finding significant gender disparities in school attendance.

This report was commissioned by the G20 Development Working Group, with the objective to shed light on child poverty and inequities - including how some groups are more affected by poverty and exclusion than others - and to emphasize the policies that are effective in tackling these inequities and supporting the most vulnerable children.

Using the example of a global shock, the COVID-19 pandemic, and research conducted by UNICEF Innocenti - Global Office of Research and Foresight, this policy brief examines the changing profiles of children living in poverty in two country contexts, Georgia and Uganda, and assesses the broader policy implications. 

By focusing on the rights of children, the Global Child Benefits Tracker is an important complement to the knowledge management tools available to advocates of child-sensitive social protection including policy makers in government and international development agencies, social protection practitioners, academia / researchers, civil society and child campaigners.

For the eighteenth edition of the Innocenti Report Card, UNICEF Innocenti examined child poverty in the high-income and upper middle-income countries in the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This Report Card provides an assessment of the current state of child poverty and the progress – or lack of progress – that these countries made towards eliminating it.

Poverty maps and small area estimates are one way of addressing this challenge. The idea is to combine household survey data with satellite imagery (e.g. night lights), information on public and private infrastructure (road density, location of critical infrastructure, travel time to hospitals, mobile phone towers and connection speed, etc.) and other possibly relevant variables (altitude, vegetation, pollution, etc.).

This research brief presents the first results of an analysis of how the cost-of-living crisis has affected the poverty experienced by households with children in the European Union (EU).

In this Policy Brief the authors present ground-breaking new evidence from Young Lives' longitudinal data showing how social protection can have a positive impact on children’s foundational cognitive skills, which are a strong predictor of educational outcomes. 

This Policy Brief draws together Young Lives evidence on the impact of early climate shocks in particular on children’s basic skills and learning, finding that early exposure to droughts and floods has a profound impact on children's nutrition and physical growth, with long term consequences for their skills development, ability to learn and progress in school.

This report is based on assessments provided by 38 Eurochild members in 26 countries and provides recommendations for each country on how to address among others, child poverty and social exclusion, discrimination, health, online safety and early childhood services.

Eurochild published its first report on Child Poverty, which provides an overview of the situation on the ground in Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, and Malta bringing children’s voices into the conversation.

This Report is the seventh in the African Report on Child Wellbeing series, a flagship biennial publication of the African Child Policy Forum (ACPF).

This paper, prepared by the World Bank Group and UNICEF, presents estimated trends in child poverty from 2013 to 2022, based on three international poverty lines: $2.15 (extreme poverty), $3.65 (lower middle income), and $6.85 (upper middle income). 

This report presents a compact update on the state of multidimensional poverty (henceforth referred to as “poverty”) in the world. It compiles data from 110 developing countries covering 6.1 billion people, accounting for 92 percent of the population in developing countries.

In many African nations, the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing difficulties, such as other diseases, natural disasters, and hunger, which the poorest families and their children face every day.

Book

The study uses 15 years of #longitudinal data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam to recommend policies to support disadvantaged children.

Graduation programmes consist of targeting poor households with a combination of layered and sequenced interventions, often over a defined period of time, in order to facilitate the achievement of strengthened and sustainable livelihoods.

The 2018 edition scores and ranks the performance of 52 African governments in improving the well-being of children. The report uses a robust, rights-based statistical methodology – the Child-Friendliness Index – and a wide range of data to measure and track progress in the commitment of African governments to children.

Policy Brief

This policy brief highlights the current state of child poverty in OECD countries and why we need policy action.

Brief

The issue of conditionality has generated substantial debate in cash transfer policy and design. This brief summarizes the debate, practice and evidence around conditional and unconditional cash transfers, before outlining UNICEF’s approach.

Brief

This brief summarizes the major considerations and available evidence around the issue of affordability, and highlights some available financing options that countries have used in introducing and scaling up social protection programmes.

Brief

A common misunderstanding is that cash transfers are misused and lead beneficiaries to become dependent on “handouts”. This policy brief draws on existing evidence to analyse this concern about social assistance and its propensity to induce dependency and misuse.

Brief

Concerns around the fertility impacts of social protection programs have long been debated and often serve as an impediment to the expansion and scale up of cash transfers. This brief summarizes the theory and evidence on the debate.

Report

2018 UNICEF report providing an overview of why cash transfers matter for children and families, how UNICEF has engaged with cash transfers globally and what opportunities and challenges exist.

Report

Tracking children's progress against the pledge to Leave No One Behind, Save the Children is calling for governments and international agencies to track not just national and global average progress, but also the pace at which disparities between socioeconomic groups are narrowing.