Equity for Children would like to take a moment to observe the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Today presents an opportunity for all to think about how to participate more actively in the fight to ensure that children suffering from marginalization, inequality, and poverty take center stage in the worldwide effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Ensuring the inclusion of children is essential to any meaningful progress, because not only do they account for a third of the world’s population, and almost half the population in least-developed countries, but they are also most vulnerable to disease, malnutrition, violence, and rights violations. Children, lacking personal resources to know, protect, and assert their basic rights, are more than twice as likely as adults to live in extreme poverty.
Our partners within the Global Coalition to End Child Poverty stress that the lack of access to nutrition, education, health, and protection diminish impoverished children’s prospects to survive and thrive as adults. Not only poor children will not be able to succeed themselves, but they will perpetuate the cycle of poverty transmitting it to their future generations. The inequality of access to basic well-being and opportunity among children in poverty constitute a human rights violation and legally binds signatory states of the Convention on the rights of the child (1989).
Our team at Equity for Children, in collaboration with the vital work of partner organizations within the Global Coalition to End Child Poverty is committed to raising awareness, promoting professional and academic research, and supporting global and national initiatives to tackle inequality among children and adolescents living in poverty. We also emphasize the key role community leaders, journalists, politicians, businesses, civil society advocates, and individuals must take in addressing this issue. One of the most critical factors in addressing and eradicating child poverty is gaining the knowledge necessary to account for everyone and study the impacts of programs and policies. To gain this knowledge, we must advocate the use of quantitative and qualitative methods to measure multidimensional poverty and gain a fuller understanding of the lived experience of affected children. Researchers are developing and must continue to innovate, strategies that include the many children who live so far from the mainstream that statistical data on poverty fails to capture them. We at Equity for Children and within the Global Coalition thank you for observing this day with us and encourage you to reflect on how you can help improve the lives of children and put them first in the global agenda.
