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Despite impressive advances in human survival and development, child malnutrition remains a grave problem - with high prevalence of underweight and rising levels of overweight and obesity. Young Lives evidence has demonstrated how better nutrition, better services and greater support to vulnerable households can not only protect the youngest children, but may also achieve growth recovery and wider developmental benefits even into early adolescence. Early is best but it's not always too late: Young Lives evidence on nutrition and growth in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam is a Young Lives summative report, synthesising research from the past 15 years across the four study countries.

This summary is based on the Young Lives Responding to children's work: Evidence from the Young Lives study in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam report, highlighting the context in which this research was conducted, cross-country findings, and key implications for policy and practice.

Responding to children's work: Evidence from the Young Lives study in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam is a Young Lives summative report, synthesising research from the past 15 years on children's work.

This chapter discusses ethics questions related to researching children’s wellbeing. It explores some conceptual difficulties related to ‘well-being’, explains the background to research ethics, and links the two. It points to some of the ideological roots of research of well-being research, and the correspondent need for critical reflection. It draws on examples from previous research experiences, and from Young Lives, an ongoing longitudinal study of child poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam.

The importance of the environment around the family for children’s development has been long recognized (for example, Bronfenbrenner 1986: 724).

Family background has been considered one of most important factors associated with child development across different settings (Brooks-Gunn and Duncan 1997; Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007). Evidence from industrialized countries supports a strong link between different background factors, such as parental socio-economic status (SES), and parental cognitive and psychosocial skills on the one hand, and children’s cognitive and psychosocial skills on the other; these factors in turn are important determinants of educational achievement, earnings, and other key outcomes in later life (Osborne-Groves 2005a; Cunha et al. 2006; Blanden et al. 2007).

This chapter discusses ethics questions related to researching children’s wellbeing. It explores some conceptual difficulties related to ‘well-being’, explains the background to research ethics, and links the two. It points to some of the ideological roots of research of well-being research, and the correspondent need for critical reflection. It draws on examples from previous research experiences, and from Young Lives, an ongoing longitudinal study of child poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam.

This chapter reports on research carried out with boys and girls, aged 12 to 15, participating in Young Lives in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It focuses on young people’s descriptions, explanations, and experiences of poverty and inequality in two contrasting rural communities and highlights implications for research, policy and practice, and rights. Young people growing up in poor communities are generally alert to inequalities and injustices, and to their own disadvantaged situations (see for example, Chapter 11 by Gillian Mann; Bissell 2009; Camfield 2010; or Witter 2002). The research presented here indicates that children perceive material inequalities as indicative of wider differences in power and position, of which they are very much a part. Children’s concerns, explanations, and experiences of the effects of poverty may differ from those of adults, and children often have distinct roles and responsibilities within their families for managing hardship and risk related to household poverty (for example, caring for siblings, carrying out essential household chores, working for pay, and going to school). There may also be important differences in patterns of children’s awareness and under-standing of inequality, reflecting their varied positioning in the social hierarchy and the range of social expectations they manage (related, for example, to age, gender, class, and ethnicity, or caste).

Researchers involved in Young Lives will have obtained data on the nutritional status of children as pre-schoolers. Subsequent rounds of data collection have generated more information on the human capital of these individuals, including school attainments and measures of cognitive ability such as reading scores and tests of vocabulary. A natural research topic is the exploration of the consequences of preschool nutrition on these outcomes; this work would join the numerous cross-sectional studies that document associations between pre-school nutritional status and subsequent attainments such as schooling and cognitive development. However, it is important to recognize that these are associations, not necessarily causal relationships, because pre-school nutritional status and subsequent attainments both reflect household decisions regarding investments in children’s human capital.

Young Lives has been introduced as a longitudinal study that follows two cohorts of children in poor communities in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam as they grow into young adults. In this chapter, after pointing to the importance of longitudinal studies in the social sciences, we use the experience of designing and implementing Young Lives to reflect on some issues surrounding the process of such studies, and on the use of their findings to inform policy.

Longitudinal studies permit us to understand factors influencing an individual’s development by observing the impact of changes over time. This chapter outlines key theoretical perspectives from developmental psychology that can be used to understand and interpret longitudinal data from different cultural and economic contexts.

Reductions in child mortality and illness are often considered the main indicators of social development. As a result, one of the targets of the Millennium Development Goals is reducing child and infant mortality rates by two-thirds. In the Ethiopian context, the target set by the national survival strategy is to reduce the under-five mortality rate from 140 to 85 per 1,000 births and the infant mortality rate from 97 to 45 per 1,000 births by 2015 (MoFED 2006a, 2006b: 117). The nutrition of children is key to reducing these mortality rates since malnutrition is currently the leading cause of disease globally (Ezzati et al. 2002) and has been identified as the underlying factor in about 50 per cent of deaths of children under five years of age in developing countries (Frimpong and Pongou 2006: 3; Black et al. 2003). Ethiopia’s Health Sector Development Program (FMoH, 2005: 39) lists malnutrition as one of the major causes of child mortality, together with pneumonia, neonatal conditions, malaria, diarrhoea, measles, and HIV/AIDS.

Confronting the ‘universal’ with the ‘local’ has become an important theme within development, contesting growth-led development strategies and uniform approaches to policy and programming. From an empirical perspective, however, the local appears multiple and contested, and the universal equally local, given that all ways of thinking are specific to particular times, places, and purposes. This understanding presents a challenge to interventions to reduce child poverty, which are typically underpinned by models of good childhoods drawn from Euro-American contexts and may neglect crucial aspects of children’s experiences. This chapter contributes to this debate from the bottom-up by reporting the diverse opinions of Ethiopian children and their caregivers on what constitutes a good or bad life for children, elicited primarily through group interviews and activities.

El potencial de calidad de la primera infancia y la educación primaria para ayudar a romper los ciclos de pobreza intergeneracionales es ampliamente reconocido. Mi atención se centra en hasta qué punto este potencial se está traduciendo en realidad, mediante la implementación positiva de principios políticas de infancia en la práctica. El documento resume la evidencia de la investigación de Young Lives sobre las transiciones tempranas, basadas tanto en la encuesta como en la investigación cualitativa en profundidad con 6.000 niños de la cohorte más joven de Young Lives en Etiopía, Andhra Pradesh (India) y Perú. La educación primaria todavía se está consolidando en Etiopía, y la educación preescolar es una minoría urbana experiencia, principalmente ofrecida por el sector privado. Perú ofrece una historia muy diferente, con un gobierno bien establecido sistema primario y preescolar pero preocupaciones sobre la calidad y coordinación entre sectores. Andhra Pradesh ofrece el conjunto más complejo de desafíos, con un sistema gubernamental de AEPC de larga data, pero una tendencia creciente hacia el uso de servicios privados, incluso entre las comunidades más pobres. El documento ofrece cinco conclusiones generales, sobre la importancia de: garantizar la calidad y la equidad en la educación temprana; sistemas preescolares y escolares mejor coordinados; dirigidos a los niños más vulnerables y desfavorecidos; reconocer la gama completa de problemas de equidad; y garantizar una gobernanza más efectiva, incluida la gobernanza del sector privado.

An estimated 220 million pre-school-age children in the developing world fail to reach their development potential because of four major factors: stunting, iron deficiency, iodine deficiency and lack of cognitive and social-emotional stimulation (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007). This undoubtedly has a large human cost. But possibly, in addition, it has a large productivity cost, which is the focus of this chapter. The question is: what are the potential productivity gains from increased investments in early childhood development (ECD) in the developing world?

Poverty is one of the most significant adversities confronted by children around the world today. Young Lives aims to improve understanding of the dynamics, causes and consequences of childhood poverty and provide evidence to support the development of effective policies for reducing it and breaking enduring poverty cycles. The study of risk and protection in the context of poverty is central to this endeavour and the focus of this chapter.

Economists often claim that economic growth in developing countries leads to a better quality of life for virtually everyone in those countries. Presumably this claim includes children as well as adults. The extent to which economic growth improves children’s welfare may depend on the nature of that growth. This has led some economists to investigate ‘pro-poor growth’, that is, economic growth that is particularly favourable to the well-being of poor people, including children.

Childhood, and the extent and consequences of childhood poverty, have a central place in the study of development. In many economies of Asia and Latin America, where growth has picked up considerably in recent years, the patterns of growth and the extent and nature of inclusion of poor people are crucially important for the type of society that will be produced for the next generation. More specifically, the educational and health opportunities for children who are currently poor, as well as the nature of their social inclusion and their general well-being, will determine their chances of partaking fully in this future society. In several sub-Saharan African countries, despite recent growth successes, sustained growth is still largely elusive, and current child poverty, with its cumulative effects on destitution, may undermine the possibility of economic growth in the future. Recent research has highlighted the cumulative consequences of childhood poverty and deprivation. For example, a meta-analysis of the effects of early childhood nutritional deficiency and poverty has highlighted its serious consequences for a variety of outcomes, including school achievement and earning potential in later life (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007).

In Ethiopia, most children work and attend school. The most recent Child Labour Force Survey (2001) showed that 52 per cent of children of primary school age in rural areas combined paid or subsistence work with schooling (Guarcello and Rosati 2007: 5).2 For policies to cater for these children, it is important to understand when children’s work competes with education and when it complements it (cf. Boyden et al. 1998: 251). If work and school are complementary, children can participate in each activity at different times of day. At best, engaging in work makes it more possible to engage in school, or vice versa. In contrast, activities can compete with each other: working may make it impossible or more difficult for children to attend school or prevent them from benefiting fully from it.

Research ethics exist to ensure that the principles of justice, respect, and the avoidance of harm are upheld, by using agreed standards. These principles are universal, though there many subtleties and diversities, and how principles are understood, interpreted, and practised can vary from place to place (Ulrich 2003). Following controversies involving deception and political involvement by researchers in the social sciences, ethical codes building on these principles were developed. These codes built on earlier ones developed for medical research on humans in the Nuremburg Code (1947, following the war crimes trials) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). The governance of research has expanded and now includes ethical practices in social research in general (ESRC 2005, 2010) and with children in particular (Alderson and Morrow 2011; Schenk and Williamson 2005). A burgeoning literature describes the processes, practices, and difficulties that occur in social research (see, for example, Armbruster and Laerke 2008; Iphofen 2009; Mertens and Ginsberg 2009; van den Hoonard 2002).

Young Lives has been introduced as a longitudinal study that follows two cohorts of children in poor communities in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam as they grow into young adults. In this chapter, after pointing to the importance of longitudinal studies in the social sciences, we use the experience of designing and implementing Young Lives to reflect on some issues surrounding the process of such studies, and on the use of their findings to inform policy.

Based on two rounds of qualitative and survey data (descriptive statistics) from caregivers and children in the Young Lives sample and a review of various social science literatures, this largely empirical piece contributes a new, culturally grounded, perspective on children’s responses to adversity which challenges notions of vulnerability and highlights young people’s active contribution to risk management and their agency.

In the past few decades, education in Peru has shown increased enrolment, especially in primary schools, but low achievement as measured by national and international standard tests in reading comprehension and mathematics. However, averages hide wide disparities in educational outcomes, which are often influenced by individual and family characteristics. Among these, coming from a family that speaks an indigenous language has been shown to be a significant predictor of low educational outcomes as compared to coming from a Spanish-speaking family (Cueto 2007: 425–6).2 In this chapter, we present and discuss evidence of this trend in Peru, suggesting policies to overcome existing inequalities.

Identity is seen by several academic disciplines as a concept critical to adolescent development. A singular, stable identity is often considered the idealised outcome of the bio-psycho-social development process. However, performing multiple distinct identities tailored for diverse contexts can be argued to be adaptive and productive for young people in difficult circumstances, such as those who are economically or socially marginal. This thesis explores if, how, and why street-associated youth in Yogyakarta, Indonesia perform distinct identities in diverse social and spatial contexts. The findings from a year-long ethnographic study form a basis for understanding better how youth perceive and enact their agency towards crafting identities as workers, as members of communities, as peers, as occupants of public space, as citizens, and on social media, within the context of rapidly changing urban landscape.

An estimated 220 million pre-school-age children in the developing world fail to reach their development potential because of four major factors: stunting, iron deficiency, iodine deficiency and lack of cognitive and social-emotional stimulation (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007). This undoubtedly has a large human cost. But possibly, in addition, it has a large productivity cost, which is the focus of this chapter. The question is: what are the potential productivity gains from increased investments in early childhood development (ECD) in the developing world?

The vast majority of Congolese refugee children living without papers in Dar es Salaam experience extreme hardship and marginalization. The material conditions in which they live are insufficient to meet their daily needs for adequate food, shelter, and health care. Like their parents, most boys and girls regularly speak of feeling hungry, tired, and worn out. They try at every opportunity to stem their chronic hunger and ill health. They work hard to contribute to the survival of their families through household chores, paid work, or exchanging services for food, soap, favours, or money. However, despite the sometimes overwhelming nature of these problems, children from as young as 9 argue that the worst part of their lives is not their material deprivation. Rather, it is the social exclusion, discrimination, and harassment that they experience on a daily basis. As ‘illegals’, they not only fear deportation, forcible removal to refugee camps, and imprisonment, but they also see signs everywhere that they are not wanted in Tanzania. Such a hostile environment leads most children to feel not only marginalized, but reduced to little else than ‘animals’ or ‘garbage’, as Munga,1 aged 16, put it.

Reductions in child mortality and illness are often considered the main indicators of social development. As a result, one of the targets of the Millennium Development Goals is reducing child and infant mortality rates by two-thirds. In the Ethiopian context, the target set by the national survival strategy is to reduce the under-five mortality rate from 140 to 85 per 1,000 births and the infant mortality rate from 97 to 45 per 1,000 births by 2015 (MoFED 2006a, 2006b: 117). The nutrition of children is key to reducing these mortality rates since malnutrition is currently the leading cause of disease globally (Ezzati et al. 2002) and has been identified as the underlying factor in about 50 per cent of deaths of children under five years of age in developing countries (Frimpong and Pongou 2006: 3; Black et al. 2003). Ethiopia’s Health Sector Development Program (FMoH, 2005: 39) lists malnutrition as one of the major causes of child mortality, together with pneumonia, neonatal conditions, malaria, diarrhoea, measles, and HIV/AIDS.

Childhood, and the extent and consequences of childhood poverty, have a central place in the study of development. In many economies of Asia and Latin America, where growth has picked up considerably in recent years, the patterns of growth and the extent and nature of inclusion of poor people are crucially important for the type of society that will be produced for the next generation. More specifically, the educational and health opportunities for children who are currently poor, as well as the nature of their social inclusion and their general well-being, will determine their chances of partaking fully in this future society. In several sub-Saharan African countries, despite recent growth successes, sustained growth is still largely elusive, and current child poverty, with its cumulative effects on destitution, may undermine the possibility of economic growth in the future. Recent research has highlighted the cumulative consequences of childhood poverty and deprivation. For example, a meta-analysis of the effects of early childhood nutritional deficiency and poverty has highlighted its serious consequences for a variety of outcomes, including school achievement and earning potential in later life (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007).

Participation in work and school are often assumed to be mutually exclusive. Thus, economists commonly present children’s work and study patterns as a competition over time. In this paper, it is not the time involved, but the characteristics of the activity that appear to influence complementary or competitive relationship between work and school. This mixed methods study combines qualitative data from Leki, a field site in a rural area near lake Ziway in the Oromia region, Ethiopia, and approximately 625 children surveyed with caregivers in Ethiopia during 2002-03 and again in 2006-07. The results provide a number of insights into the characteristics of work and school activities that have implications for how children balance each. Work-related features included the scarcity of work. If children got the rare chance to work on a farm, such an opportunity would often take precedence over going to school. Many types of work were indivisible. Tasks could not be stopped, started, and completed over time. Some forms of domestic work, like cooking, could be equally indivisible for girls. Further, if work was particularly tiring, it could diminish children’s ability to concentrate and pay attention at school. Finally, attempting to do chores and study at home could mean that work and school competed for children’s attention. Girls said that it was difficult to study at home because they could be called to do chores at any time. Conversely, boys noted that they were able to read while herding, making it easier to keep up with their school work. Costs and flexibility were particularly important for school participation. Some children dropped out because they could not afford the school supplies and uniforms required. Also, the school calendar was not flexible to fit with children’s patterns of work. For example, the calendar did not accommodate the vegetable harvest, a common time in which children were needed to work. In summary, this paper draws attention to a more complex relationship between work and school. Rural Ethiopian children were able to balance the two not merely based upon the time an activity required, but upon numerous features of the activity that made it more or less feasible to juggle.

Research ethics exist to ensure that the principles of justice, respect, and the avoidance of harm are upheld, by using agreed standards. These principles are universal, though there many subtleties and diversities, and how principles are understood, interpreted, and practised can vary from place to place (Ulrich 2003). Following controversies involving deception and political involvement by researchers in the social sciences, ethical codes building on these principles were developed. These codes built on earlier ones developed for medical research on humans in the Nuremburg Code (1947, following the war crimes trials) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). The governance of research has expanded and now includes ethical practices in social research in general (ESRC 2005, 2010) and with children in particular (Alderson and Morrow 2011; Schenk and Williamson 2005). A burgeoning literature describes the processes, practices, and difficulties that occur in social research (see, for example, Armbruster and Laerke 2008; Iphofen 2009; Mertens and Ginsberg 2009; van den Hoonard 2002).

Young Lives has been introduced as a longitudinal study that follows two cohorts of children in poor communities in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam as they grow into young adults. In this chapter, after pointing to the importance of longitudinal studies in the social sciences, we use the experience of designing and implementing Young Lives to reflect on some issues surrounding the process of such studies, and on the use of their findings to inform policy.

Longitudinal studies permit us to understand factors influencing an individual’s development by observing the impact of changes over time. This chapter outlines key theoretical perspectives from developmental psychology that can be used to understand and interpret longitudinal data from different cultural and economic contexts.

Researchers involved in Young Lives will have obtained data on the nutritional status of children as pre-schoolers. Subsequent rounds of data collection have generated more information on the human capital of these individuals, including school attainments and measures of cognitive ability such as reading scores and tests of vocabulary. A natural research topic is the exploration of the consequences of preschool nutrition on these outcomes; this work would join the numerous cross-sectional studies that document associations between pre-school nutritional status and subsequent attainments such as schooling and cognitive development. However, it is important to recognize that these are associations, not necessarily causal relationships, because pre-school nutritional status and subsequent attainments both reflect household decisions regarding investments in children’s human capital.

Confronting the ‘universal’ with the ‘local’ has become an important theme within development, contesting growth-led development strategies and uniform approaches to policy and programming. From an empirical perspective, however, the local appears multiple and contested, and the universal equally local, given that all ways of thinking are specific to particular times, places, and purposes. This understanding presents a challenge to interventions to reduce child poverty, which are typically underpinned by models of good childhoods drawn from Euro-American contexts and may neglect crucial aspects of children’s experiences. This chapter contributes to this debate from the bottom-up by reporting the diverse opinions of Ethiopian children and their caregivers on what constitutes a good or bad life for children, elicited primarily through group interviews and activities.

Children grow up in multiple socio-cultural spaces that structure activities and learning according to local notions of what is appropriate for their development (Super and Harkness 1986; Miller and Goodnow 1995; Rogoff 2003: 18–24). Contradictions across these spaces may be particularly sharp in modernizing societies where long-standing local ‘traditional’ practices and ideologies, such as the duty to contribute to family economic well-being, confront modern rights-based ideologies embedded in instruments such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. While they seek to advance the rights of all children to protection and development, these instruments are also forces for the globalization of the state of childhood and child rights (Myers 2001: 39; Boyden 1990: 194). The purpose of this chapter is to explore the experience of children who engage in agricultural work in South Africa as they grapple with the challenges of rural poverty, obligations to support kin and community, and the demands of school (Bourdillon 2009).

Poverty is one of the most significant adversities confronted by children around the world today. Young Lives aims to improve understanding of the dynamics, causes and consequences of childhood poverty and provide evidence to support the development of effective policies for reducing it and breaking enduring poverty cycles. The study of risk and protection in the context of poverty is central to this endeavour and the focus of this chapter.