Further results on the extent of child poverty disaggregated by location, household size, and characteristics of the household head such as gender, education, and industry of work, show the following for 2022 (see appendix tables 16 to 30):  25.7 percent of children (243.6 million) living in households with 6 or more members live in extreme poverty, versus 6.1 percent of children (2.2 million) living in households with one or two members. Similarly, the extreme poverty rate for members in households with no children is 6.4 percent versus the 15.8 percent in households with children.

 22.4 percent of children (276.4 million) living in rural settings live in extreme poverty, versus 6.5 percent of children (54.1 million) in urban settings. It is well documented that deep inequities exist within urban settings with pockets of extreme poverty, in informal settlements. This warrants further analysis of the data, to explore intra-urban child poverty disparities.

 There are significant differences in extreme child poverty rates based on education of the head of household, 32.6 percent of children (94.7 million) living in households where the head of household has no education, live in extreme poverty, versus 3.9 percent of children (6.3 million) in households where the head has tertiary education.

 Likewise, there are significant differences based on the industry of work of the head of household, 30.8 percent of children (80.8 million) living in households where the head of household works in agriculture live in extreme poverty – and they comprise 71 percent of all children living in extreme poverty.

 Contrary to the results of 2017, where children living in female headed households were more likely to be living in extreme poverty, the 2022 nowcasting shows the opposite, 20.7 percent of children living in male headed households are living in extreme poverty, versus17.4 percent of children in female headed households. There are four key explanations for this shift, namely 1. New surveys included from several countries in the Africa region which included different consumption measurement questionnaires; 2. The updated extreme poverty line ($2.15), resulted in significantly different results in child poverty rates based on sex of head of household in a number of countries; 3. The 2022 nowcasted analysis does not include information on sex of head of household for India (the 2018 survey dataset from India did not include this information), whereas the analysis in 2017 did include this information (based on a 2011 survey dataset for India); and 4. For the 2017 dataset for Nigeria all households were coded as being female headed, significantly skewing the results. This highlights the challenge of relying on self-reported headship to understand gender differences in poverty, as it can hide important differences in the types of households in which individuals live.

There are further household characteristics that provide critical information for influencing policies and programs, not least child poverty based on disability status, as well as more nuanced analysis to tease out gender differences – but unfortunately this is not possible at this time using data from the global harmonized database.

8