The Handbook on Child Poverty and Inequality, edited by Alberto Minujin and Enrique Delamonica, offers a vital, timely exploration of how poverty and inequality uniquely impact children. With a child rights lens, the Handbook challenges the conventional, one-dimensional approaches to measuring poverty, instead advancing a multi-dimensional framework that reflects children’s lived realities. This is not just a theoretical shift—it is a call to action for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to rethink how we define, measure, and address deprivation in childhood.
Spanning topics from the emotional and social dimensions of poverty to the role of new technologies like machine learning in child poverty research, the Handbook features the voices of expert authors and, crucially, those of children themselves. The volume identifies the structural causes of poverty and inequality, mapping out how these issues are compounded when child-specific needs and rights are ignored. Chapter 29, “We Measured Child Poverty and Inequality, then What?” by the editors, underscores the urgent need to move from data collection to meaningful policy transformation, guided by both evidence and ethical responsibility.
This Handbook is a critical resource for anyone committed to advancing children’s rights: academics, development professionals, and decision-makers alike. It bridges the often siloed fields of child poverty and inequality research, providing a blueprint for comprehensive, rights-based policies that can reduce and ultimately eliminate child deprivation globally.
