Abstract
The paper argues on the basis of data from Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty, and an extensive review of child-centered poverty studies that experiences of relative poverty and social exclusion are as common and corrosive in contemporary Ethiopia as North America and Europe. If taken seriously, this insight could broaden the focus of child poverty reduction from nutrition and education to include the psychosocial costs of lacking the culturally-specific resources required for full participation in society. The paper makes a number of methodological points of value to researchers undertaking similar studies: firstly, poverty can be explored by asking about illbeing; secondly, children’s conceptions of poverty are profoundly social and context-specific; and thirdly, young children are just as able to address these themes as older ones.
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Notes
While there are a few studies in the UK and internationally that use similar methods to those used in the paper to identify children’s priorities in relation to poverty (reviewed in Camfield et al. 2009a), the outputs typically report the indicators rather than the discussion which gives no sense of the research or social contexts in which they were constructed. For this reason the review focuses on in-depth studies that give a sense of the meanings behind the indicators.
While this is true of most of rural Ethiopia, parents and children in Aksum noted their absence.
The sample comprised 495 boys and 484 girls, 583 of whom came from rural areas and 396 from urban.
All data is taken from the fieldworkers’ notes, which were written immediately after the activity and supplemented by listening to the audio-recording and noting verbatim quotes.
The older cohort also ranked the indicators within each community and we have noted where these rankings differ from the picture given by a simple count of frequencies.
Dercon and Krishnan 2009 describes the validation of these indices.
Of course, Middleton does not deny the impact on cognitive development of nutritional deprivation in the early years.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks Young Lives participants and researchers, and Virginia Morrow and Gina Crivello who provided invaluable comments on an earlier draft. Young Lives is funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and based on a collaborative partnership between the University of Oxford, Save the Children UK, The Open University, UK, and a series of prominent national research and policy institutes in the four study countries.
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Camfield, L. “Even If She Learns, She Doesn’t Understand Properly”. Children’s Understandings of Illbeing and Poverty in Five Ethiopian Communities. Soc Indic Res 96, 85–112 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-009-9468-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-009-9468-z