A seminar hosted by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs for senior policymakers, practitioners and researchers.
A Policy Seminar for Sector Specialists
About this event
This invitation-only event for senior Dutch policymakers, practitioners and researchers working with an interest in childhood poverty and related poverty issues discussed two key areas of concern that are currently emerging in international policy debates on poverty: How can we tackle persistent poverty, and intimately linked to this question, what can be done to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty?
Participants
Participants came from: Bernard van Leer Foundation; Children’s Legal Action Network, Kenya; Cordaid; Institute of Social Studies; IREWOC; International Child Development Initiatives (ICDI); the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (staff from The Hague and education advisers from embassies in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Pakistan); Plan Nederland; Save the Children Netherlands; Salgalú Peru; University of Amsterdam, University of Nijmegen, Woord & Daad.
Chair
Joost Andriessen (Director of the Dept for Cultural Cooperation, Education and Research), Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Presentations
Jo Boyden: Young Lives and the Dynamics of Child Poverty
Catherine Porter: Longitudinal Research: Benefits and Challenges
Professor Martin Woodhead: Education For All… Including Early Education for All?
Franta Wijchers: Policy Priorities in Education and the Dialogue with ODA in Ethiopia
Ajay Sinha: Policy Priorities and Public Finance for Children in Young Lives Countries (India)
Discussants
Sonja Kuip, Senior Policy Officer, Dept of Cultural Cooperation, Education and Research, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Liana Gertsch, Bernard van Leer Foundation
Four presentations from the Young Lives team gave an overview of some of the recent Young Lives research findings, set against the context of a presentation by Franta Wijchers from the Dutch embassy in Addis Ababa about the reality of matching government and donor policy in Ethiopia. This framed a wider discussion of how research can be used by policymakers and the kind of policy changes that are needed to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
Following several years of economic growth, poverty reduction and improvements in infrastructure (witnessed in all 4 Young Lives study countries), the current global economic downturn and crisis in food and fuel prices is having a direct impact on children’s lives. Young Lives research provides evidence of how fragile the gains experienced by many poor households are, and even relatively short-term shocks (such as illness or death of a family member, drought or flooding, crop failure or livestock disease) can have long-term impacts on child well-being. For example, 20% of the children in the Young Lives sample in Ethiopia had lost either one or both parents by the age of 12, with lasting effects on their schooling, confidence, and self-esteem. The presentations focused on the challenges of increasing access to education while at the same time improving quality – and the challenge of meeting parents’ and children’s hopes and aspirations surrounding their education. Children strive hard to balance their learning with other responsibilities and roles in their families and communities – and this interface is one of the sites where the struggle between tradition and modern attitudes plays itself out. The current global economic downturn means that we need to find ways of delivering quality education that is relevant to the reality of children’s lives as well as new sustainable models of education to help children escape the poverty trap.
Following the presentations, a modified world café methodology was used to facilitate a lively discussion, particularly around the question of how longitudinal research can support policymaking. It is hard to summarise the richness of the discussion, but some interesting perspectives emerged:
- How do we value knowledge as well as research? It was pointed out that the science of early childhood development is generated and ‘owned’ by a tiny minority of academics, and yet the knowledge of early childhood is vast and worldwide. The evidence that has been used to date for the science of childhood comes from limited (mainly Northern) sources, and our understanding is based on a small number of childhoods. One of the challenges to Young Lives is to bring together research (science) and knowledge (people’s own perspectives) about diverse childhoods.
- Age matters for children – the age at which things happen to them affects how they survive and thrive, and the effect of poverty is quite different as they grow (i.e. they are much more profound and with longer-lasting consequences when children are young). Also the way parents and caregivers make decisions about a child’s future changes at different ages – as we see very clearly in how decisions are made depending on a child’s gender (e.g. whether to send a child to public or private school) – and this has major repercussions for the child’s life trajectories.
- We need to think through much more clearly whether childhood poverty is best framed in terms of a rights-based or human development approach.
- The importance of incorporating children’s perspective into policy, and the need for research to assess the effectiveness of child-focused policies, for example to improve the quality of education or to bridge the gap between education and employment.
Jo Boyden concluded with a few words reminding participants of the opportunity afforded by this year’s twentieth anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for open and frank discussion of the rights that children need to have protected in the new global economic order where rapid change and shifting policy contexts are the order of the day.
A seminar hosted by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs for senior policymakers, practitioners and researchers.
A Policy Seminar for Sector Specialists
About this event
This invitation-only event for senior Dutch policymakers, practitioners and researchers working with an interest in childhood poverty and related poverty issues discussed two key areas of concern that are currently emerging in international policy debates on poverty: How can we tackle persistent poverty, and intimately linked to this question, what can be done to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty?
Participants
Participants came from: Bernard van Leer Foundation; Children’s Legal Action Network, Kenya; Cordaid; Institute of Social Studies; IREWOC; International Child Development Initiatives (ICDI); the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (staff from The Hague and education advisers from embassies in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Pakistan); Plan Nederland; Save the Children Netherlands; Salgalú Peru; University of Amsterdam, University of Nijmegen, Woord & Daad.
Chair
Joost Andriessen (Director of the Dept for Cultural Cooperation, Education and Research), Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Presentations
Jo Boyden: Young Lives and the Dynamics of Child Poverty
Catherine Porter: Longitudinal Research: Benefits and Challenges
Professor Martin Woodhead: Education For All… Including Early Education for All?
Franta Wijchers: Policy Priorities in Education and the Dialogue with ODA in Ethiopia
Ajay Sinha: Policy Priorities and Public Finance for Children in Young Lives Countries (India)
Discussants
Sonja Kuip, Senior Policy Officer, Dept of Cultural Cooperation, Education and Research, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Liana Gertsch, Bernard van Leer Foundation
Four presentations from the Young Lives team gave an overview of some of the recent Young Lives research findings, set against the context of a presentation by Franta Wijchers from the Dutch embassy in Addis Ababa about the reality of matching government and donor policy in Ethiopia. This framed a wider discussion of how research can be used by policymakers and the kind of policy changes that are needed to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
Following several years of economic growth, poverty reduction and improvements in infrastructure (witnessed in all 4 Young Lives study countries), the current global economic downturn and crisis in food and fuel prices is having a direct impact on children’s lives. Young Lives research provides evidence of how fragile the gains experienced by many poor households are, and even relatively short-term shocks (such as illness or death of a family member, drought or flooding, crop failure or livestock disease) can have long-term impacts on child well-being. For example, 20% of the children in the Young Lives sample in Ethiopia had lost either one or both parents by the age of 12, with lasting effects on their schooling, confidence, and self-esteem. The presentations focused on the challenges of increasing access to education while at the same time improving quality – and the challenge of meeting parents’ and children’s hopes and aspirations surrounding their education. Children strive hard to balance their learning with other responsibilities and roles in their families and communities – and this interface is one of the sites where the struggle between tradition and modern attitudes plays itself out. The current global economic downturn means that we need to find ways of delivering quality education that is relevant to the reality of children’s lives as well as new sustainable models of education to help children escape the poverty trap.
Following the presentations, a modified world café methodology was used to facilitate a lively discussion, particularly around the question of how longitudinal research can support policymaking. It is hard to summarise the richness of the discussion, but some interesting perspectives emerged:
- How do we value knowledge as well as research? It was pointed out that the science of early childhood development is generated and ‘owned’ by a tiny minority of academics, and yet the knowledge of early childhood is vast and worldwide. The evidence that has been used to date for the science of childhood comes from limited (mainly Northern) sources, and our understanding is based on a small number of childhoods. One of the challenges to Young Lives is to bring together research (science) and knowledge (people’s own perspectives) about diverse childhoods.
- Age matters for children – the age at which things happen to them affects how they survive and thrive, and the effect of poverty is quite different as they grow (i.e. they are much more profound and with longer-lasting consequences when children are young). Also the way parents and caregivers make decisions about a child’s future changes at different ages – as we see very clearly in how decisions are made depending on a child’s gender (e.g. whether to send a child to public or private school) – and this has major repercussions for the child’s life trajectories.
- We need to think through much more clearly whether childhood poverty is best framed in terms of a rights-based or human development approach.
- The importance of incorporating children’s perspective into policy, and the need for research to assess the effectiveness of child-focused policies, for example to improve the quality of education or to bridge the gap between education and employment.
Jo Boyden concluded with a few words reminding participants of the opportunity afforded by this year’s twentieth anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for open and frank discussion of the rights that children need to have protected in the new global economic order where rapid change and shifting policy contexts are the order of the day.