Shirley Gatenio Gabel

Investing in Children: Public Commitment in Twenty-one Industrialized Countries

Using time series and survey data, this article explores public commitment to children and their families from 1980 through 2001 in 21 industrialized countries. Despite the shrinking child population in all countries and the slowed growth of the welfare state in most, the authors find that spending on children and families has increased in most countries. The authors conclude that the instruments and goals of the family benefit and service package have changed over time and that future public spending on children is increasingly likely to go toward helping families balance their responsibilities as workers and parents and toward enhancing the development of young children.

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs): A Child Policy Strategy in Asia

A new social policy tool emerged a little more than a decade in Latin America and in Asia that brought immediate relief in the form of cash to poor families with children and conditioned the benefits on behavioral changes that would affect the long-term well-being of beneficiary households. By conditioning benefits on school attendance and obtaining health-care and social support services, many countries especially those in Latin America were able to reverse intergenerational and intractable poverty rates. These programs, conditional cash transfers (CCTs), spread quickly throughout Latin America but have also become popular in other parts of the world. This paper looks at how CCTs have been used as a child policy strategy in Asia, summarizing the forms it has taken and the effectiveness of the programs in six Asian countries, and ends with a discussion of lessons learned from these experiences.

The Development of International Comparative Child and Family Policies

In the decades following Kamerman and Kahn’s observations, the field of comparative child and family policy blossomed in both the industrialized and developing world. Today, child and family policies are an essential component of most countries social welfare schemes, though the scope, types of benefits and the allocation of resources vary widely. There is growing attention paid to evidence-based childcentered comparative research in both the industrialized and developing parts of the world and on the transferability of policies from one country to another. Interest in the portability of policies is not only among like-developed countries, but also from developed to developing countries and the visa-versa.

Social protection and children's rights in developing countries

Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in almost any population because of their physical and emotional dependence on adults and social status. Their vulnerability is greater in many developing countries because of the higher incidence of poverty and nascent social protection mechanisms. Social protection can serve as a tool to perpetuate inequities or can be used to promote human rights, equality, and inclusiveness. This paper looks at how social protection evolving in four developing countries, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, affects the realization of childrens rights. Each countrys social protection efforts are analyzed according to the type of effort and then compared to indicators measuring the realization of childrens rights. The analysis indicates that well-coordinated social protection systems with wide coverage that include social assistance, social insurance, as well as human capital and empowerment efforts are more likely to result in the progressive realization of childrens rights.

Book review: Childhood Poverty: Multidisciplinary Approaches

weather events, will exacerbate the severity of the ‘hunger season’ afflicting many vulnerable South Asian populations. Government and civil society responses to hunger will therefore need to build seasonality into their food security planning and programming (pp. 211–213). Chapter 21 (Kamara et al.) documents in detail the link between food import dependence and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, providing information on the extent of different countries’ vulnerability to future price shocks. Finally, some chapters provide regional-scale documentation of how small-holders are adapting to food price volatility. Marambanyika (Ch. 22) describes how small farmers in Zimbabwe have improved household income and nutrition through vegetable production. Unfortunately, there are a number of weak entries in Global Food Insecurity. Some lack analytical depth and rigour, and others are poorly edited, with frequent spelling, grammatical and editing mistakes. The value of the book would have been enhanced by a more judicious selection of contributions. In addressing the global food crisis, we need both the kind of radical, paradigmatic thinking associated with food sovereignty as well as careful, detailed analyses of policy options. The challenge may be to get the two worlds to talk to one another.