By Dr. Gyan Pathak
“Regrettably, efforts to reduce poverty are slowing. If we are to reverse this slowdown and accelerate progress, we need to maintain and extend the approaches that have been shown to work in recent decades,” says the State of the World Children 2025, a flagship report by UNICEF.
The Executive Director of UNICEF Catherine Russell has said it the report that it reveals, “Progress in reducing child poverty is under threat.” Today three acute crises are converging to undo decades of improvement while undermining our ability to build the future children deserve.
Sudden unprecedented cuts in development aid have devastated services for children and could result in the deaths of at least 4.5 million children under 5 years of age by2030, according to The Lancet. The cuts could also leave 6 million children out of school by next year. Two in five children were still in poverty in 2023.
Economic forces will play a role too – especially in determining countries’ abilities to fund anti-poverty programmes and public services. Here, the outlook is particularly concerning.
As the World Bank has warned, economic growth is slowing in many developing economies, which risks limiting the ability of these countries to expand their programmes.
The report says that the situation will be worsened by unprecedented cuts in development aid. It is estimated that these cuts will result in the deaths of at least 4.5 million children under age 5 by 2030.Each of these deaths is a tragedy for a family, and a shocking loss of human potential for our societies.
The three crises that are mentioned in the report are:
Conflict is spreading. Armed violence now touches twice as many children as it did 30years ago. When violence forces children from their homes, poverty follows. Schools aredestroyed. Families are displaced. Poverty rates climb.
Climate change is intensifying. One billion children already live in countries at extremely high risk from climate impacts like droughts and floods. The burden falls heaviest on communities already struggling with poverty.
External debt repayments are diverting investment in children, exceeding health and education spending combined in many low-income countries. Countries are forced to choose between servicing debt and ensuring children can survive and thrive.
These crises feed each other – climate disasters trigger displacement, displacement fuels conflict and mounting shocks like aid cuts drive countries deeper into debt, Catherine Russell warned.
Ms Russell has further asserted in the report, “Child poverty is not inevitable. As this report shows, when countries make ending child poverty a national priority – with resources and action – childhoods can be transformed. The strides of the past quarter-century prove this is achievable. Since 2000, the rate of severe deprivation among children has fallen by a third. The number of children living in extreme monetary poverty has dropped from 507 million to 412 million. But these gains are fragile, and the window for protecting them is closing.”
The report talks about the future of the Children and says, we will also need to respond to the new trends and challenges that will shape the lives and well-being of children in the future. As The State of the World’s Children 2024 (SOWC2024) demonstrated, megatrends like demographic shifts, climate and environmental crises, and frontier technologies will create a world for children in 2050 that looks very different from today’s. Our response to these trends will partly determine how much we reduce child poverty.
However, that response cannot wait. As SOWC 2024 noted, “The future is now, and our responsibilities are clear. Now is the time to shape a better future for every child.” As this report shows, societies are already grappling with the impacts on poverty of trends like climate change, rising conflict and economic uncertainty.
Conflict meanwhile now touches the lives of growing numbers of children: Almost one in five children lived in a conflict-affected area in 2024, nearly double the rate in themid-1990s. As well as the heightened risk of extreme monetary poverty in conflict zones, disruptions to education can set back economic growth for generations, limiting long-term poverty reduction.
And inequalities in digital access – the gap between the digital haves and the digital have-nots – are increasingly shaping children’s access to economic opportunity, the report emphasised.
The report has warned that aid cuts will also limit children’s ability to learn and build brighter futures. International aid for education is projected to fall by almost a quarter by 2026, leaving 6 million more children at risk of being out of school by the end of next year. That number represents the equivalent of emptying every primary school in Germany and Italy. The challenges underscore the need in many countries for social sector reforms and increased domestic investment in children.
National action and ownership are essential – but mounting debt threatens to undermine both. Developing countries across Africa are in the midst of a debt crisis, which is forcing governments to divert funding away from essential services for children. Forty-five of the world’s developing countries now pay more on interest than they spend on health, and22 spend more on interest than education. Countries’ inability to invest in children’s health and well-being creates a vicious cycle: Failing to invest in children’s human capital undermines economic prosperity, which in turn hinders countries’ ability to repay debt.
“Without coordinated global action to address the debt challenges of developing countries,” the report warns, “we risk creating an indebted generation – a cohort of children whose futures are compromised as countries struggle to service debt incurred before they were born.” (IPA Service)
