Putting Children First

Keetie Roelen is Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Centre for Social Protection at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK. Her research and policy advice work focuses on child poverty, social protection, and economic strengthening across the globe. Richard Morgan is the International Advocacy Director for Plan International, promoting the rights of girls and gender equality worldwide. Yisak Tafere is a coordinator of the Ethiopian Center for Child Research at the Ethiopian Development Institute. He has been the lead qualitative researcher with Young Lives in Ethiopia. Since he joined in 2007, he has led four rounds of core and many more sub-study qualitative research fieldwork, in collaboration with colleagues in both Oxford and Ethiopia. He holds an MA in Social Anthropology from Addis Ababa University and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Child Research from the Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology (NTNU).

Despite important strides in the fight against poverty in the past two decades, child poverty remains widespread and persistent, particularly in Africa. Poverty in all its dimensions is detrimental for early childhood development and often results in unreversed damage to the lives of girls and boys, locking children and families into intergenerational poverty. This edited volume contributes to the policy initiatives aiming to reduce child poverty and academic understanding of child poverty and its solutions by bringing together applied research from across the continent. With the Sustainable Development Goals having opened up an important space for the fight against child poverty, not least by broadening its conceptualization to be multidimensional, this collection aims to push the frontiers by challenging existing narratives around child poverty, exploring alternative understandings of the complexities and dynamics underpinning child poverty, and, crucially, examining policy options that work to address this critical challenge.