Children and Poverty

IN ACKNOWLEDGING that every individual under the age of 18, if recognized by a country's law, has certain rights that must be protected, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child sought to ensure the well-being of all children and treat them as individuals with their own privileges and freedom of expression. The convention, which was ratified by most United Nations member states (the exceptions being Somalia and the United States) and adopted into law in September 1990, asserts that children must be protected and provided with the necessary supports in order to mature into healthy adults.

Adoption of the convention has spurred a growing awareness on the part of world leaders that more concerted efforts were needed to provide children with a healthy start and protection against abuse, exploitation, and inadequate diet. To this end, the September 2005 United Nations World Summit witnessed one of the most auspicious gatherings of world dignitaries to reaffirm the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that the United Nations declared in 2000. Among the nine stated goals that the MDG seeks to realize by 2015 is an improvement in the life chances of children by eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and reducing child mortality.

Poverty is highly contextual, which means that child poverty can take on different forms and can be accounted for by varying micro and macro conditions, depending on what region of the world they reside in. For [Page 151]some of the most impoverished nations in the southern hemisphere, poverty is often described in absolute terms and reflects an individual or family's ability to consume a specific caloric intake of food that is considered to be minimal to guard against starvation, dehydration, or life-threatening disease.

For richer nations, where basic human needs such as food and water are provided, poverty measures often focus on income disparities or individuals’ ability to purchase a range of goods and services deemed acceptable based on a country's standard of living. Poverty measures used around the world reflect these technical and conceptual distinctions about what constitutes poverty and also underscore differences in the standard of living enjoyed by nations of the northern hemisphere compared to those in the south.

A commonly cited measure of poverty in developing countries is the World Bank's Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimate, which sets the international poverty level for extreme poverty around $1.08 per day or $32.74 a month. By the end of the 1990s, the per capita income for nearly 44 percent of the population of least developed countries was at or below this extreme poverty threshold and close to 75 percent of the population were trying to survive on nearly $2 per day.

In contrast, most western European countries have favored measuring poverty in “relative” terms, whereby thresholds are set in terms of the proportion of households with incomes less than 50 percent of the median adjusted household income for the country of residence. The United States’ Federal Poverty Line (FPL), a more “absolute” approach, which was established in the mid-1960s to define a minimum level of subsistence, takes into consideration the size and composition of a household to determine its poverty status at a fixed point in time. Families are considered as being in poverty if their annual earnings fall below a designated threshold, depending on the size of the family. For a family of four in 2004, the U.S. poverty threshold was $19,307.

...