What Works for Africa's Poorest Children

This chapter presents and contextualizes the volume and provides a backdrop for the chapters that follow. In line with the What Works for the Poorest (Lawson et., al 2010, 2017) series, we continue our aim of advancing the identification and measurement of the very poorest and vulnerable in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), whilst highlighting some of the programmes, and their design components, that seem to ‘work’. This volume focuses exclusively on children and contains unique methodological approaches in order to assist the most vulnerable and poorest children in SSA issues of heightened importance given the COVID-19 pandemic. As has become customary in the series, we complement the volume with both cross SSA and individual country experiences. We hope to: 1) raise awareness of the problems faced by the poorest and most vulnerable children in Africa; 2) encourage policy makers and development practitioners to identify strategic interventions to move from the measurement of child poverty in all of its dimensions to action; and 3) provide practical examples from a number of African countries that have succeeded in alleviating the burden of poverty and deprivation on children and other vulnerable groups. Introduction: Who are the poorest and most vulnerable children in Africa? Every child is born with the same inalienable right to a healthy start in life, an education and a safe, secure childhood – all the basic opportunities that translate into a productive and prosperous adulthood. But around the world, millions of children are denied their rights and deprived of everything they need to grow up healthy and strong – because of their place of birth or their family of origin; because of their race, ethnicity or gender; or because they live in poverty or with a disability (UNICEF, 2016: 1). When we started the What Works for Africa’s Poorest (Lawson et al., 2010) series, there were relatively few books focusing on extreme and chronic poverty. Over the last decade, methodological advancements have been made in identifying the poorest and most vulnerable, and we feel that this volume continues this advancement and provides cutting edge approaches in our transition towards the appropriate identification, measurement, and attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Copyright practicalactionpublishing.com WHAT WORKS FOR AFRICA’S POOREST CHILDREN 2 In the last volume of What Works for Africa’s Poorest (Lawson et al., 2017), we reflected on the relatively unparalleled prior two decades of economic growth, and the dramatic reductions in income/consumption (and multidimensional) poverty (e.g. Gertz and Chandy, 2011). This was a cause for optimism but, at the same time, we noted that the benefits of this contemporary growth had been unevenly distributed. The situation has been exacerbated by COVID-19 and the shift in many countries’ development policies from the previous focus on the investment of public resources to support rural livelihoods (Ellis and Bahiigwa, 2003; Ellis and Freeman, 2004), to a continued focus on investment in structural development of the economy to spur economic growth benefits that are assumed to trickle down to the poor (Timmer and Akkus, 2008). A reverse shift has been supported by an increasing number of empirical studies, such as Collier and Dercon (2014) who argue that national development plans will need to be re-oriented towards more ‘structural transformation’ in order to achieve better results in poverty alleviation. With generally low human capital formation and limited asset holdings, the poor are likely to face many challenges before benefiting from structural transformation to the economy (Zimmerman, 2000). These challenges will only be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it will therefore take deliberate and dramatic efforts to successfully extend current benefits to the greater proportion of the citizens in each country. In addition to the heterogeneity in sharing the benefits of economic growth in recent decades, climate, health and conflict shocks are likely to pose major threats to the welfare of households and children, in the future. In the short-run, the impact of health related shocks on households from disease and virus, such as COVID-19, has the potential to impact on children lives through a number of transmissions mechanisms – from quarantine efforts such as school closures that have the potential to disrupt children’s routines (see Box 1.1 for impact examples) and support systems to direct welfare effects of limited job market opportunities for older adolescents (Van Lancker and Parolin, 2020). According to a recent WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission report, climate change, conflict, and pervasive inequalities will pose serious threats to the welfare of children (Clark et al., 2020). The increased frequency and intensity of climate change-induced shocks affecting ‘low-income’ countries, particularly in the tropics, is increasingly threatening the welfare of millions of households. This is particularly true for the countries where the vast majority of the population live in rural areas practising smallholder agriculture with minimal or no use of improved inputs such as drought tolerant seeds, fertilizers, and irrigation technologies among others. Accordingly, any exposure to severe weather events results in substantial losses in agricultural production, increasing the precarity of farmers and their families. The impact of this can be significant given that 75 per cent of people living in poverty in low-income countries reside in rural areas (Heinemann et al., 2011). Young people in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are disproportionately involved in and affected by conflict, which leads to many and varied development challenges, situations of displacement, intergenerational emergencies, and Copyright practicalactionpublishing.com WHAT WORKS FOR THE POOREST? 3 structural inequalities that vary country by country (e.g. Boerma et al., 2019; Goodhand, 2001; Bodea and Elbadawi, 2008; Efevbera and Betancourt, 2016; Maxted, 2003; Slone and Mann, 2016; Yair and Miodownik, 2014). In recent years, the proliferation of conflict in the region, spreading to new territories and increasingly involving predominantly non-state actors, has had a serious negative impact on the welfare of affected households. In addition, conflict is increasingly becoming a major cause of food insecurity across SSA according to the United Nations 2018 interagency report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (FAO et al., 2018). Given that, within households, children usually bear the brunt of any household welfare losses through decline in health and missed education, for example (Abiona, 2017), this chain, if not broken, risks pushing many children and their households into an intergenerational poverty trap (Horrell et al., 2001; Bird, 2013). However, it is reassuring to know that there is now growing global interest and efforts to address the endemic negative welfare suffered by children. For example, within the SDGs, there are 17 indicators specifically aimed at improving the welfare of children. These indicators aim to address endemic challenges such as: under-five mortality; neonatal mortality; early childhood development; stunting, wasting, or childhood obesity; and child labour, among others. In SSA, performance measured against these and other child welfare indicators is far from reaching global targets. For example, only eight countries (approximately 15 per cent of all African countries) have managed to reduce under-five mortality to less than or equal to 25 deaths per 1,000 live births, consistent with SDG 3.2 (Table 1.1). Relatedly, a global ranking of countries by child flourishing – calculated using indicators of children’s survival, health, education, and nutrition – reveals that nine of the bottom ten countries are from Africa (WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission, 2020). Transitional perspectives of vulnerable children One of the ways in which children survive is to engage in child labour. UNICEF (2019) estimate that at least 29 per cent of children aged 5–17 years in SSA are engaged in some form of labour, which can manifest itself in many forms, from domestic care in the home, engagement in the informal economy or the provision of agriculture, to more hazardous types of work such as the sex trade. According to Hindman (2009), there are two views of child labour: the mainstream view of it as harmful and able to entrap children, their families, and communities in cycles of poverty and underdevelopment; and the view that we should support children to find decent work when it is essential for family and child survival. However, for the most vulnerable, this second view is not always an accessible reality and one solution to enabling sustainable futures for children is to provide access to education. However, children engaged in labour are at an increased likelihood of dropping out of school. A UNESCO (2019) monitoring report shows that SSA has the highest proportion of school dropout of children and youth of primary, lower Copyright practicalactionpublishing.com WHAT WORKS FOR AFRICA’S POOREST CHILDREN 4 Table 1.1 Incidence of under-five child mortality in Africa, 2000–2018 Country1 Mortality rate, under-five (per 1,000 live births) Gap to SDG target2 200