Jo Boyden

Cohort Profile: The Young Lives Study

Young Lives is an international longitudinal study investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty in four low-income countries [Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam] over a 15-year period. In each country, the cohort is comprised of ≈ 2000 children aged between 6 and 18 months and up to 1000 children aged between 7 and 8 years, recruited in 2002 and sampled from 20 sentinel sites. The first survey data collection from primary caregivers and older children took place in 2002, the second in 2006-07 and the third in 2009-10. Data on the community contexts were collected to complement the household surveys. To elaborate and extend the quantitative data, longitudinal qualitative research with a subgroup of the children was carried out in 2007, 2008 and 2010-11. Topic areas covered included nutrition, health and well-being, cognitive and physical development, health behaviours and education, as well as the social, demographic and economic status of the household. Survey data from the study are archived in the International Section of the UK Public Data Archive.

Questioning the Power of Resilience: Are Children Up to the Task of Disrupting the Transmission of Poverty?

The development and application of the concept of resilience as a tool for examining the ways in which young humans are able to overcome the negative outcomes of poverty and prevent its transfer within families, households and communities and assesses its usefulness for poverty researchers and practitioners [CPRC WP 73].

‘We’re not going to suffer like this in the mud’: educational aspirations, social mobility and independent child migration among populations living in poverty

This article examines the association between formal education, social mobility and independent child migration in Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam and draws on data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of childhood poverty and schooling. It argues that among resource-poor populations, child migration sustains kin relations across generations and households and also facilitates children’s progression through the life-course, thus it is fundamental to social reproduction. It reasons that formal education has greatly amplified this trend. Schooling has acquired symbolic value as the prime means of escaping household poverty and realising ambitions for social mobility. As such, elevated educational aspirations combine with systems shortcomings to stimulate school selection, school transfer and school-related child migration. The article concludes by examining the implications for children, for social reproduction and for policy.

Why does child trafficking policy need to be reformed? The moral economy of children's movement in Benin and Ethiopia

This paper challenges policy discourses that frame childrens independent movement as intrinsically exploitative and threatening to their development. Drawing on research with children and adults in Benin and Ethiopia, two countries caught up in current efforts to eradicate child migration and the trafficking with which it has become associated, the paper critiques assumptions about childrens vulnerability and physical dependence and contests the idea that appropriate childhood is necessarily fixed spatially within stable family structures. It, thus, situates childrens migration within socio-cultural and economic contexts and suggests that it should be understood as part of a moral economy that confounds simplistic paradigms that conflate migration with trafficking. Policy suggestions are offered for how best to secure childrens well-being through acknowledgement of the important relationship between mobility and child maturation.

What place the politics of compassion in education surrounding non‐citizen children?

In this response to the article by Madeleine Arnot, Halleli Pinson, and Mano Candappa the author explores three issues that are key to the current refugee and education regimes in Britain. She addresses the association between the British state and the children living within its dominion, the role of education in contemporary British statecraft and the core values of the education system insofar as it concerns asylum‐seeking and refugee children. Building on the authors’ discussion of the role of compassion in education around non‐citizens, the author problematises this concept and examines some of the political and popular perceptions that are brought to bear in relation to this topic. In particular, she highlights how the interests of the modern state are vested in children and how, in line with this, government attention to instilling public morality in school pupils has centred on a nationalist ideology which excludes forced migrants. She argues that in a context in which a persistent moral and instrumental case is made against asylum‐seekers and refugees, teachers struggle against the odds to achieve the successful integration of these children within British schools.

Political Economy, Perception, and Social Change as Mediators of Childhood Risk in Andhra Pradesh

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.

Schooling, childhood poverty and international development: choices and challenges in a longitudinal study

Due to the rarity of longitudinal data, evidence on the benefits of education across the life-course is relatively sparse in developing countries. Young Lives is the only comparative dual-cohort study to combine data collection using mixed-methods at child, household, school and community levels, following 12,000 children in two cohorts across four countries since 2002. This article outlines the conceptual and analytical framework and the key methodological features of the Young Lives study, and the unique potential of the data for analysis of educational trajectories, and of the influences that shape them. It discusses the challenges associated with a cross-country interdisciplinary study of children, their families and schools and examines how these were addressed. These include the logistical, epistemological and ethical challenges of ensuring the integrity of the panel data and cohort, maintaining an appropriate degree of consistency across countries in terms of design and measurement, without compromising policy relevance at the national level, and balancing the sometimes competing demands for cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence.

Why are current efforts to eliminate female circumcision in Ethiopia misplaced

This paper discusses the eradication challenges of female circumcision in Ethiopia. It argues that despite an overall decline in the practice nationally, eradication efforts have caused significant quandaries for girls and their families. The most common justification by far for its continuance is that circumcision confirms a girls social place by proving her readiness for marriage and adulthood and thereby ensures her protection against material want. Hence, intervention has often resulted in the transformation, rather than the elimination, of the practice, the exchange of one type of risk for another, or even increased risk to girls. In discussing policy, the paper argues that there has been a misapplication of the risk concept in the promotion of change in Ethiopia. It calls for risk definitions and interventions that are more holistic, correspond more closely with childrens social realities and take into account the phenomenological dimensions of experience.

Understand the lives of youth in low-income countries

For most of the world’s adolescents, poverty and social marginalization influence health much more than risk-taking does, argue Robert Blum and Jo Boyden. For most of the world’s adolescents, poverty and social marginalization influence health much more than risk-taking does, argue Robert Blum and Jo Boyden.

Introduction: Child Poverty and the Centrality of Schooling

In the year 2000, the United Nations agreed on time-bound Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015. Children are strongly affected by the development agenda, both directly and indirectly. Two of these goals, namely achieving universal primary education and reducing infant mortality, target children directly. Most of the other goals — on maternal health, combating disease, gender equality, and environmental sustainability — have a strong impact on children’s well-being. Goal 1, ‘eradicating extreme poverty and hunger’, is especially signifIcant for children for two main reasons. First, childhood is the most signifIcant period in shaping long-term outcomes in terms of physical, mental, social, and emotional development, when poverty, malnutrition, and limited opportunities for learning can have strong adverse consequences. Inequalities are typically established even before children reach school age and permanently influence their opportunities later in life — something that affects the children as individuals, their families, and society as a whole. Second, children comprise a large proportion of the population in low- and middle-income countries and are disproportionately represented among the very poor; numerically, children deserve serious attention when considering poverty.