This report presents emerging evidence from the Young Marriage and Parenthood Study (YMAPS), a comparative qualitative study of marriage, cohabitation, parenthood and divorce among marginalised adolescents and young people in Ethiopia, India (in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Zambia between 2018 and 2020.

YMAPS is a multi-country collaboration involving research partners in Ethiopia, India, Peru, Zambia, Canada and the UK, led by Young Lives and Child Frontiers, and funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

With the aim of investigating the drivers and impact of childhood poverty, since 2001 Young Lives has collected a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data on many dimensions of children’s development in four low- and middle-income countries: Ethiopia, India (the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Vietnam.

Throughout Young Lives, we have provided various measures of food insecurity. These include the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS), developed by the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance Project (FANTA) (Coates, Swindale, and Bilinsky 2007), but also stand-alone questions, such as ‘Was there ever no food to eat in your household because of a lack of money?’ which was employed across different survey rounds in all four Young Lives study countries: Ethiopia, India (the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Vietnam.

After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, our four study countries are each facing significant economic and social challenges, and rapidly changing circumstances. But COVID-19 is not the only global crisis; our evidence from Ethiopia reflects unprecedented times, as vulnerable families grapple with the compounding effects of civil conflict and climate change.