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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.

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.

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).

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.