Rapid Urbanisation, Economic Growth and the Well-being of Children

We start with an overview of national income trends over the past two decades and consider their likely impacts on child poverty to see whether, at a macro level, children have generally benefitted from strong sustained economic growth. We then consider the effect of rising urbanisation on child well-being. On balance, do children benefit from greater urbanisation, or are rural environments broadly better for the health and well-being of children? The available research allows some broad conclusions to be drawn, but closer examination of even the traditional dimensions of child well-being quickly highlights a third issue – the adequacy of the available data. Much national data is not available on a rural/urban split, let alone in a form that allows changes in the well-being of poor urban children to be separately considered. Consequently, focusing on the nine countries where World Vision has urban learning centres or pilot projects, this section of the report considers gaps in both the depth and breadth of data that need to be filled to provide a fuller picture of urban child well-being. And this brings us to the fourth issue: irrespective of the quality of the available data, are the mainstream elements of child welfare sufficient to provide an adequate picture of child well-being in an urban context? New threats and opportunities in urban environments are challenging our ideas of what constitutes the well-being of urban children. Using examples of the work of World Vision and others to reduce child poverty in urban settings, we argue that NGOs are well placed to contribute to a better understanding of some of the less tangible but very important factors that influence the well-being of children in diverse and rapidly growing urban environments.