Abstract
In 2009, a joint statement was published by a range of international partners to advance child-sensitive social protection (CSSP). It aimed at a greater consensus on the importance of CSSP and outlined particular vulnerabilities that children and families face, the ways that social protection can impact children even when children are not the focus, and the principles and approaches for undertaking CSSP (UNICEF, 2009).
Since then, social protection has rapidly expanded and is seen as one of the success stories of the development agenda (Devereux, 2016). With the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, there is even a specific target for social protection under Goal 1 (End poverty), namely, 1.3. to ‘implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable’.
For the first time in human history, child poverty has been given due policy attention on the international stage. In 2017, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative reinforced this agenda by disaggregating the global Multidimensional Poverty Index by age group and gender to analyse the situation of 1.8 billion children, explicitly addressing and measuring child poverty (Alkire, 2018). There are growing expectations that significant changes to improve child outcomes are possible by 2030.
Despite this positive momentum, the coverage of social protection programmes remains inadequate, only covering an estimated 45% of the global population and 35% of the global child population (International Labour Organization [ILO], 2017).
Even more, extreme poverty, measured at $1.90 per person per day, disproportionately affects children. Currently, there is an estimated 385 million, or 19.5% of the world’s children living in extreme poverty compared with 9.2% of adults (Newhouse et al., 2016; UNICEF and World Bank, 2016).
While there are several substantive technical and methodological debates surrounding social protection programmes and the ways in which they are implemented, it is clear that they need to account for the specific needs, vulnerabilities and rights of children, in poverty and crisis situations. Only by doing so can they achieve better results for girls and boys of all ages across a range of deprivations and reduce the need for negative coping strategies that may harm them and limit their future potential.
This Forum focuses on the issues, concepts and methods around designing, implementing and evaluating CSSP programmes and policies that could optimise poverty reduction outcomes for children throughout their lifecycle.
The five contributions in this Forum individually contribute to new knowledge and approaches, providing frameworks and data in different contexts. They do so by outlining the fundamental elements of an integrated social protection system required to support children throughout their ‘life course’ (Khurshid et al.); the specific impacts that combining nutrition (Tasker and Harman) and parenting (Arriagada et al.) actions with cash transfer interventions can have on early childhood development outcomes; the need for greater consideration of child sensitivity for a new wave of ‘graduation’ programmes (Roelen); and how to ensure more appropriate and context-specific evaluation approaches for CSSP programming (Mahendru and Tasker).