Children Living in Poverty

Is the issue of children living in poverty recognized by and incorporated into antipoverty strategies? Who are the children living in poverty? Have governments, civil society organizations, and international organizations identified them and adopted policies to reduce child poverty? Is the situation of girls living in poverty taken into account? Are poverty reduction policies following a human rights-bases approach? This paper addresses some of these and reviews different concepts regarding child poverty (e.g. different definitions of children living in poverty and efforts to measure child poverty). The paper also maps some policies and strategies to reduce child poverty. In general, the paper finds that there is a lack of consideration of children’s issues in the anti-poverty strategies. However, several organizations have recently adopted a human rights-based approach to defining children living in poverty. A few governments have actually started to incorporate explicit targets and policies to reduce the number of children living poverty.

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