Development: World Bank Urged to Embrace Children

This article suggests that children's advocates are increasing pressure on the World Bank to include
children's rights in poverty reduction strategies. According to author Niko Kyriakou, "for years, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and UN agencies have complained of being unable to get the World Bank to fund a number of socially related projects that protect the rights of children." Advocates suggest that the bank needs to focus its programmes on services that keep people out of poverty in the long run and not simply on boosting economically poor families' incomes.

According to Kyriakou, one of the reasons the World Bank's policies fail to reach children is because their poverty strategy is mainly focused on income-related
poverty data gathered by household. Howard White, Senior Evaluation Officer in the bank's Internal Evaluation Department describes how economically poor children not living in households are left out and the example White alludes to: "a bank survey in Mauritania did not cover nomads or street children."

The article points to education as an example of how the bank's strategies are not helpful to the economically poor. Rosalia Cortes, principal researcher at the Latin
American Social Scientists Association points to the issue of irregular school attendance of children. She states that in Latin America "poverty and welfare programmes don't address these issues. They just transfer money to the head of the household'' with no way to ensure how the money is spent." Further she states, new studies show "a continuation of a long-term pattern of low education, low skill, and low opportunity for employment."

Under the World Bank's current model for poverty reduction, any country seeking assistance from the bank or its sister agency, the International Monetary
Fund, must draft a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). The papers should prioritise ''macroeconomic, structural, and social'' strategies to reduce poverty using input from civil society, according to the lending agency's Web site.

Kyriakou points to one change that could positively affect the issues. That is, closer cooperation between the bank and UN agencies. According to Monique Segarra, an international development specialist and professor at U.S.-based Vassar College, Uganda's poverty policies are augmented by being linked not only to national poverty reduction goals but also to UN Millennium Development Goals which address child poverty.