Research Reports - Page 2

International Policy Center for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) presents a series of One Pagers (OPs) aimed at stimulating public policy debates on key inclusive development issues. Covering interrelated areas, such as equitable access to water, electricity, and sanitation, cash transfer programmes, gender equality, employment generation policies, HIV/AIDS financing, and inclusive macro and financial policies, the present collection is a useful tool for policymakers, development specialist and advisors, researchers, the civil society and the UN family.

This report examines children’s experiences of growing up during the period of the Millennium Development Goals. It is based on an analysis of survey and qualitative data from 12,000 children in four countries – Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam.

This publication sheds light on the magnitude of domestic work, a sector often “invisible” behind the doors of private households and unprotected by national legislation. This volume presents national statistics and new global and regional estimates on the number of domestic workers, including child domestic workers.

This World Bank policy research working paper investigates household-level strategies for adapting to climate change in rural settings, looking particularly at the adaptive capacity of poor rural households – a subject the authors claim has received little attention due to its broad and complex nature.

Changes that happen within communities can have considerable consequences for the lives of children and their families. This paper demonstrates the importance of considering the community context and shows how differences between sites can be significant.

Date: 19 Dec 2012

Series: Young Lives Working Paper 90

A report published on January 28 2013 by the Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) presents the campaigning activities undertaken by forty children and young people in Austria, Cyprus, England, the Netherlands and Romania to try and create violence-free youth custodial settings in their countries. 

The campaigning activities were carried out as part of CRAE’s Ending Violence against Children in Custody project, funded by the European Commission’s Daphne III programme.

The youth-led campaigns in each country were based on the recommendations developed by young researchers in the first phase of the project.

January 2013 Issue No.13

This month’s review includes an important paper about the survival and development of children born into families affected by HIV (Chen et al, 2012), the importance of social and psychological support to HIV-affected parents for the survival of their children (Ruton et al, 2012), and issues related to children’s rights (Cheny, 2013) and child participation (Farmer et al, 2013), and care and support for orphaned children (Shibuya & Taylor, 2013; Zapata et al, 2013).

New report launched on Safer Internet Day 2013 (Tuesday 5 February) by the EU Kids Online project. Nearly 10,000 children between 9-16 years old from 25 European countries were surveyed for the report, and were asked ‘What things on the internet would bother people about your age?’. The report presents, for the first time, a detailed analysis of how children view the risks associated to the online world ‘in their own words’.

Changes that happen within communities can have considerable consequences for the lives of children and their families. This paper demonstrates the importance of considering the community context and shows how differences between sites can be significant.

Date: 19 Dec 2012

Series: Young Lives Working Paper 90

UNICEF UK has published The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: a study of legal implementation in 12 countries, which looks in countries beyond the UK in order to compile evidence of the most effective and impactful ways of embedding children’s rights into domestic law. The 12 countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden) were chosen to demonstrate the variety of ways in which different places have provided for children’s rights at the national level by taking steps to implement the Convention. The research was led by Professor Laura Lundy, Director of the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queen’s University Belfast ( www.qub.ac.uk/ccr), collaborating with Professor Ursula Kilkelly at University College Cork.

The South African Child Gauge is the only publication in the country that provides an annual snap-shot of the status of South Africa’s children.

It is published by the Childwatch key institute: Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town. The publication tracks South Africa’s progress towards realising children’s rights.

The 2012 issue focuses on the theme 'Children and inequality: closing the gap'.

The aim of the publication is to provide children and youth in Asia a platform to report on progress made towards these commitments from their own point of view. It documents the perspective of children from seven Asia countries on how disasters and climate change affects their lives and their rights. The report also supports the implementation of the Children's Charter for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Working Paper 85 presents children’s experiences and perceptions of poverty. It draws on survey and qualitative data from the Young Lives study of poor children in Ethiopia. Through group exercises, discussions and interviews, children and young people aged 13-17 collectively and individually provided their perceptions of the causes, indicators and consequences of poverty in their communities.

There has been growing interest in researching the dynamics of poverty, including poverty mobility. Looking at change over time and what caused this change can provide useful information for policymakers and those who seek to influence them. Young Lives makes use of the three rounds of survey data and of qualitative data from sub-sample children. The focus in this paper is tribal households not conforming to the general trend of upward mobility. It locates these households, analyses their characteristics, and identifies the factors that cause the downward mobility of certain households. 

This Young Lives paper is a contribution to the global thematic consultation Addressing inequalities within the post-2015 development agenda which is being co-organised by UNICEF and UN Women. Failure to fully integrate equality principles is recognised as major limitation of the Millennium Development Goals, and neglect of inequalities has also detracted from the progress made in many areas. The paper draws attention to the many ways that inequality impacts on children’s experience of growing up.

This report by the UNICEF Office of Research, takes stock of the development of independent human rights institutions for children globally and identifies the specific roles they perform. It also pinpoints core elements, characteristics and features that contribute to their institutional success or otherwise.

"Because we are sisters and brothers" describes the most important outcomes of research activities and documentations about sibling relations in alternative care from five different countries: The SOS Children's Villages associations in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Spain have worked on the topic and together they developed the articles and recommendations in this publication.

This paper explores some of the factors which impede and promote public sector responsibilities towards children. The purpose of this analysis is to seek methods of assessing the performance of governments in their roles as protectors of the rights of children according to their international commitments. The multiplicity of actors involved in the process is described and the related problems for cooperation and effective implementation considered.

The 2012 edition of the Child Development Index highlights the impressive progress the world has made in reducing child mortality and ensuring millions more children go to school.

Sebastián J. Lipina and Michael I. Posner argue that a child ’s reaction to stress is an important factor in success in school and our understanding of the stress reaction may also guide us in analyzing other brain systems more directly involved in schooling.

The recently published literature review from the CP MERG Technical Working Group (TWG) on Data Collection on Violence against Children (VAC) aims to capture current thinking on ethical issues and provide empirical support to guide recommendations for ethical research practice and decision-making in collecting data on VAC. The review examines documentation, including both published and ‘grey’ literature that is of specific relevance to research ethics in collecting data on VAC.

UNICEF’s flagship report, ‘The State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in an Urban World’, was launched  28 February, in Mexico City. One billion children live in urban areas, a number that is growing rapidly. Yet disparities within cities reveal that many lack access to schools, health care and sanitation, despite living alongside these services. This story is part of a series highlighting the needs of these children.

This installment of the UNICEF Office of Research Report Card series, aims at focusing on the well-being of children in industrialised countries. It considers two views of child poverty in member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): a measure of absolute deprivation, and a measure of relative poverty.

Find full report here.

Since the introduction of the Child Support Grant (CSG) in 1998, the majority of the benefi ciaries are now women. The grant reaches 10.7 million children which makes up approximately 55 percent of the total number of children in South Africa. The CSG is internationally recognised to be an innovative intervention to reduce poverty and promote child well-being.

The first ever World report on disability, produced jointly by WHO and the World Bank, suggests that more than a billion people in the world today experience disability.