4 new Young Lives Working Papers using Ethiopia or India data

Working Paper 41. Community Understandings of Children’s Transitions in Ethiopia: Possible Implications for Life Course Poverty, Yisak Tafere and Laura Camfield, January 2009

The paper explores the views of caregivers and other adults on the nature and timing of transitions made by children aged 11 to 13 in five Ethiopian communities, spanning rural, peri-urban and urban locations. The three transitions selected are schooling, work and ‘early’ marriage for girls, which provides a gendered example of rites of passage that are engaged in alongside institutional transitions and affect their success or failure. Adult perspectives are the focus as these are assumed to be more strongly reflective of the community norms that shape children's transitions. The paper provides a summary of the legislative and programmatic background to key transitions (for example, UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child, the structure of the Ethiopian schooling system and secondary data on school attendance, grade retention, etc.) before exploring each in turn. It concludes that the rejection of government policies on marriage and education represents a critique of these rather than an attachment to ‘traditional practices’ which have become increasingly fragile as people respond to material poverty and environmental challenges. Policymakers need to understand and in some cases challenge ‘invisible norms’, but also recognise the visible economic constraints and limited opportunity structures that increase the appeal of child work or early marriage. In these communities, children’s transitions are rarely linear, singular, or focused solely on ‘learning’, but are instead multiple and often contradictory. While children from poor communities and households are said to be constrained by their lack of opportunities, in fact their likelihood of making successful transitions is reduced by having too many potentially contradictory opportunities, too soon.

Working Paper 40, Productive Safety Net Programme and Children’s Time Use Between Work and Schooling in Ethiopia, Tassew Woldehanna, January 2009

Government, non-government and donor organisations have developed a social assistance programme known as the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) which has two subprogrammes, namely the Public Work Programme (PWP) and Direct Support Programme (DSP). PSNP is designed to reduce the vulnerability of poor people to drought. It targets households in most cases without considering ex ante the issue of intra-household resource distribution. This paper assesses, using Young Lives survey data, the impacts of PSNP and Agricultural Extension Programme (AEP) on time use between work and schooling, as well as the highest grade completed by 12-year-old children in rural and urban Ethiopia. Empirically the study used propensity score matching techniques to estimate the impact of PSNP and AEP on child welfare measured by time use in various types of work, schooling and studying. We found that PWP in rural areas increases child work for pay; reduces children’s time spent on child care, household chores and total hours spent on all kind of work combined; and increases girls spending on studying. The DSP in rural and urban areas reduces time children spent on paid and unpaid work, and increases the highest grade completed by boys in urban areas. On the other hand, AEP in rural areas was effective in reducing child work for pay and total work, increasing time girls spent on schooling and the highest grade completed by girls.

Working Paper 38. The Formation and Evolution of Childhood Skill Acquisition: Evidence From India
Christian Helmers and Manasa Patnam, January 2009

Building on recent advances in the literature and using a rich data set for two cohorts of children aged between one and twelve for Andhra Pradesh, India, we investigate the determinants of children's cognitive as well as non-cognitive skills. We find evidence of selfproductivity for cognitive skills and cross-productivity effects from cognitive on non-cognitive skills. Moreover, we demonstrate that parental investment has contemporaneously powerful positive effects on skill levels for all age groups. Investigating other determinants of these skills, we find child health at age one to influence cognitive abilities at age five, whilst child health at age one is influenced by parental care already during pregnancy and earliest childhood. Understanding the determinants which account explicitly for the effects of a large number of child, caregiver and household characteristics provides insights with regard to possible policy interventions to improve the chances of children in poor environments of developing cognitive and non-cognitive skills crucial for success in many spheres of life.


Working Paper 37. ‘Children With a Good Life Have to Have School Bags’: Diverse understandings of well-being among older children in three Ethiopian communities, Laura  Camfield and Yisak Tafere, January 2009

This paper focuses on children’s understandings of well-being and ill-being in resource-poor contexts in Ethiopia, using quantitative and qualitative data collected from individuals and groups. The quantitative data are drawn from Young Lives child questionnaire, which was administered to children aged 11 to 12 across 20 sentinel sites in Ethiopia during 2006. The qualitative data come from group activities with a sub-sample of these children in five
communities and individual interviews that build on these activities (the data presented here focus on an urban, a remote rural, and a near rural community). Having established the importance of considering children’s understandings of well-being and described some of the methods used, the paper addresses two questions. Firstly, how understandings of a good life and what is needed to achieve this differ between different types of community and social group. Secondly, how the relationship between well-being and education articulated in the group activities is expressed in the biographies of individual children, drawing on the examples of a twelve-year-old girl and boy from the remote rural site.

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