Child Poverty Access to Services
The Issue
Children experience and suffer poverty differently to adults. The effects of living in poverty, even if for short spells, have impact throughout their lifetime. Poverty robs children of the things they need most for survival and development: nutrition, education, health services, water and sanitation. As children grow, the consequences of poverty are compounded, taking a severe toll on their well-being and ability to build a better future for themselves, their families and their communities.
Why Does it Matter?
Article 27 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that every child has the right to an adequate standard of living that can meet their needs and support their development. Similarly, the UN Sustainable Development Goals have set a target to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. They have called for multidimensional child poverty – a measure of poverty that goes beyond income – to be halved by 2030, building a world in which all children have what they need to fulfil their potential.
Worldwide, the poorest 20% of children are twice as likely to die in childhood as their wealthier peers. For those growing up in humanitarian crises, the risks of deprivation and exclusion surge. Even in the world’s richest countries, one in seven children still live in poverty. Today, one in four children in the European Union are at risk of falling into poverty.
There is currently insufficient evidence in many low and middle-income countries to understand the reasons why children cannot access basic services. Local governments – increasingly responsible for providing health, education and other services – frequently lack the capacity to determine where and how children are missing out. Without resources to collect local data and consult the communities they serve, decision makers may struggle to develop plans and budgets that reach children in need.
Our Project
This project will focus on mapping children’s physical accessibility to key services, such as health clinics and schools, in selected countries. We aim to establish whether the distance and time it takes to travel to a key service could help explain a child’s lack of access to that service, and how access is related to multidimensional childhood poverty.
We will explore if access (measured in terms of distance and time) to certain services can be determined using geospatial data sets, such as remotely sensed satellite data and road information from open street maps. Using cutting edge Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques and Earth Observation data, we will estimate travel time to a service. In addition, we will attempt to identify if there is an optimal way of measuring access to services – e.g. straight line distances, door-to-door access or cost surface analysis, which defines the relative difficulty of crossing a certain area. For example, following a path will be less costly than crossing marshland terrain.
Following this, we will evaluate the contribution of distance and geographic accessibility to health and education services to childhood poverty. We will provide information such as the median distance travelled and median travel time for each village. These quantifiable ‘scores’ will help inform effective and efficient programme design.
Currently, household surveys such as the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) and the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) are used to assess access to social services. These surveys include information such children’s school attendance and if children visited a clinic when suffering from a specific medical condition. Whilst this information is valuable, the surveys often do not ask further clarifying questions. Why did a family not bring their unwell child to a health clinic? Why is a child not in school?
We already know that children who lack access to vital services are living in poverty. The question we want to answer is if they lack access because services are not available, or too far, or difficult to access for other reasons.
Our Outputs
