1 What are we learning about Intergenerational Transfer of Childhood Poverty? A case study of Young Lives Project By: Irene Nyamu Introduction This paper analyses some of the prevailing debates in the understanding of childhood poverty and its transfer across generations given that children continue to be the most disproportionately affected by poverty to date. This is in spite of many years of investment efforts to combat poverty, many of which remain palliative rather than curative as was initially expected, and poverty levels remain relatively high particularly in Africa (Moyo 2009). Mounting evidence shows a slight improvement between 1999 and 2005 when the number of people living on $1.25 a day decreased from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion before a sharp decrease caused by the recent global financial crisis (UNRISD 2010). Changes have been quite uneven and in fact there are huge regional variations, with China and India accounting for the largest decline in real numbers compared to Sub-Saharan Africa poverty. This has resulted in widening of the inequality gap (Ibid). The declining living conditions and high inequality is seen as a consequence of harsh policy prescriptions imposed upon developing countries by their richer benefactors whose motivation has been to entrench economic globalization and liberalization of the market. As a result of the Washington Consensus for example, many governments tremendously reduced investments into public provisioning of education, health, agricultural subsidies and extension services as well as other social benefits to their citizens (UNRISD 2010). Most of these services were privatized, and with introduction of user fees, most poor families are consequently unable to access social services with ease (UNRISD 2010). Given the skewed and age-dependent allocation of household resources, children from poor households suffer most as result of changes brought about by unfriendly policies. Two decades later, the effects are increasingly manifesting themselves through child poverty and intergenerational poverty, leading us to question whether one generation can be held responsible for the poverty or wealth of the next and in what ways. According to (Bird and Higgins 2011:9) intergenerational transfer of poverty (IGT) refers to “the private and public transfer of deficits in assets and resources from one generation to another’’. Parents can pass on their state of being poor to either their children or to their old parents if the country does not have social security programs that take care of the elderly for example. Being poor means that parents are unable to make investments in terms of adequate nutrition and health care, education for their children as well as and savings and investments that they could then pass on to their children as inheritance. If parents themselves have low schooling outcomes, they are less likely to educate their children, have low earning capacity and are more vulnerable to internal (for instance death of a spouse) as well as external (famine) shocks with the resultant effect that children have to contribute both paid and unpaid labor for household survival (Bird and Higgins 2011, Sabates‐Wheeler et al. 2009). A lot of children in developing countries are therefore starting out their lives already poor, with the unlikely chance that they will bridge the gap between them and their richer counterparts even with interventions aimed at reversing the decline (Sabates‐Wheeler et al. 2009). This places them at great disadvantage too early in life, and challenges any efforts to combat world poverty-for example halving world poverty by 50 percent by 2015. The implications are that regardless of how poverty is defined (see Fischer 2013 for poverty measurement debates), policies aimed at eradicating poverty will not succeed unless intergenerational poverty is understood and confronted from a structural and multi- dimensional perspective. The IGT mechanisms have not been fully understood, with increasing calls for a life-course perspective if we are to fully understand childhood poverty well and develop sustainable interventions (Bird and Higgins 2011, Sabates‐Wheeler et al. 2009).This long view needs a certain type of data which is lacking in many developing countries for several reasons. It is laborious to collect and expensive to produce as it requires specialized capacity to consistently collect and analyze it over long periods of time – with the same cohorts or similar subjects in order to observe changes (Birds ad Higgins 2010).