Sheridan Bartlett, in “Children in Urban Poverty: Can They Get More
than Small Change?,” highlights the plight of children living in urban
poverty. It’s widely recognized that the world is more than half
urban; less widely acknowledged is the catastrophic extent of urban
poverty or its implications for hundreds of millions of children. We
are used to thinking of urban children as being better off than rural
children in every way – better fed, better educated, with better
access to health care and a better chance of succeeding in life. For
many children, this is true. But for growing numbers, the so called
“urban advantage” is a myth. Children growing up in urban poverty
often remain invisible, not only uncounted but frequently
unreached by any basic services: living without secure tenure;
heavily exposed to toxics and pollutants; among the groups most at
risk from disasters and the direct and indirect impacts of climate
change; and, confined to small overcrowded homes with little
opportunity for exploration or physical activity. It is crucial that
policymakers understand that poverty reduction approaches
developed to tackle rural poverty will not necessarily work in urban
settings, as the nature of urban poverty is different from that of
rural poverty.
Addressing child deprivations, however, must go beyond. In the late
1990s, when the development agenda opened to address poverty,
major significant contributions were made. Many surveys and
studies were done to understand the poor. Now we know who the
poor are, their difficult conditions, voices, dynamics and concerns.
However, looking at the poor only is unlikely to bring major
change. The critical issue is to address inequality.
Ortiz and Cummins’ comprehensive look at income distribution in
141 countries shows that global inequality is staggering. Using
different estimation models, their analysis “Global Inequality: Beyond
the Bottom Billion,” shows a world in which the top 20% of the
population enjoys more than 70% of total income, contrasted by