Children’s experiences and perceptions of poverty in Ethiopia

Children can be more than just victims of poverty; they can be agents of its alleviation. This paper presents Ethiopian children’s and young people’s perceptions of poverty based on their own experiences.

The paper indicates that the surveyed children identified what they believed to be the root causes of poverty and suggested what the government, parents and children should do to reduce it.

Findings are as follows:

• children experience poverty as an environment that is damaging to their mental, physical, and emotional development
• children’s poverty experiences suggest the multi-dimensional, contextualised and inter-generational nature of child poverty
• children suggested that the government could play a major role in reducing poverty (e.g. through rural development), but parents should adopt family planning and children should support parents by working
• notably, children thought that child poverty could be addressed by changing some of the societal values that contribute to its perpetuation

Conclusions include:

• children and young people have demonstrated their resilience, not only by providing suggestions for tackling poverty, but also by practically contributing to family incomes
• indeed, children and young people proved to be competent enough to provide rich data from their lived experiences of poverty
• this data can advance the knowledge about childhood poverty and help developing apt policies to reduce it
• yet, what researchers need is to adopt better participatory methods that can help to get more data from the children
• policymakers needs to address education, employment and social protection for the most needy in order to end persistent poverty
• policy interventions on child poverty should rightly estimate the challenges posed by societal values that are contributing to poverty