Shocks and the changing profiles of children living in poverty
While poor households tend to be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of covariate shocks, previously non-poor households may also become impoverished when their capacity to cope with the impact is overwhelmed.
Highlights
In a world increasingly characterized by fragility and shocks, it is important to evaluate and understand the changing profiles of children living in poverty, to expand UNICEF´s and partners' awareness and understanding of these changing patterns and to explore the critical implications in terms of policy and programmatic responses, including through social protection.
Using the example of a global shock, the COVID-19 pandemic, and research conducted by UNICEF Innocenti - Global Office of Research and Foresight1,2, this policy brief examines the changing profiles of children living in poverty in two country contexts, Georgia and Uganda, and assesses the broader policy implications.
Globally, prior to the pandemic, the profiles of children and their families living in poverty showed that in general, they are most likely to live in rural settings3, in countries/territories affected by conflict and fragility and in households where the head had little or no education and/or is engaged in agriculture. In addition, extreme child poverty has been increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in terms of absolute numbers of children, most children living in extreme poverty live in lower middle-income countries.
However, the combined impacts of COVID-19, conflict and climate change led to an unprecedented increase in child poverty at the height of the pandemic, reversing the progress that had been made in recent years, and to changes to long-established profiles of the characteristics of children living in poverty. These changed profiles of children living in poverty are explored in this policy brief. While the focus of the analysis is on the pandemic, the policy lessons are relevant to a wide range of socio-economic shocks.
