The analytical foundation of the report is the Global MPI, an index built from ten indicators spanning three dimensions: health, education, and living standards. A household is classified as multidimensionally poor if it is deprived in at least a third of these ten indicators. What distinguishes the new study is its pairing of this household-level measure with individual-level data on children themselves, specifically their nutritional status and school attendance. This is the first global multidimensional study of children’s experiences of poverty within the home based on observed household survey data, covering 97 countries for undernutrition and 108 countries for school attendance. By linking individual and household deprivations, the researchers can quantify not just how many children are deprived, but how many deprivations each child carries simultaneously.

The headline numbers are stark. Across the 97 countries with available nutrition data, covering 518 million children under five, roughly one-third are undernourished, meaning they are either stunted or underweight. Globally, 96 million undernourished children also live in multidimensional poverty, equivalent to one in five children in the surveyed population. Perhaps most striking is the intensity of deprivation among this doubly disadvantaged group: each multidimensionally poor and undernourished child experiences, on average, four to five additional deprivations beyond undernutrition itself, whether in access to clean cooking fuel, safe drinking water, sanitation, electricity, schooling, or housing. Deprivation, the data suggest, rarely travels alone.

The schooling picture follows a similar pattern. Across 108 countries with available data, 13 percent of the 1.04 billion school-aged children are out of school, a total of 136 million children. More than 80 percent of all out-of-school children are also multidimensionally poor, numbering 110 million. Each poor out-of-school child experiences an average of five additional deprivations across the other nine Global MPI indicators. Taken together, 31 percent of the 1.04 billion school-aged children covered by the study are out of school, multidimensionally poor, or both. Sabina Alkire, Director of OPHI and co-author of the study, said she was shocked by how tightly clustered the intensity of poverty is for children, noting that the data reaffirm the need for multisectoral approaches to development programmes such as social protection.

One of the report’s most methodologically significant findings concerns inequality within households. Rather than assuming that all children in a poor household share the same disadvantages, the researchers examined whether deprivation is distributed evenly among siblings. It is not. Over one-third of poor children under five live in a household in which at least one child is undernourished while another is not. Similarly, over one-third of poor children live in households where some school-aged children attend school and others do not. This intra-household variation, documented at global scale for the first time, carries a pointed implication for programme design: interventions that treat the household as a uniform unit of disadvantage may miss children whose needs are invisible in aggregate statistics.

The report also paints a stark picture of women’s educational disadvantage and its relationship to child outcomes. In multidimensionally poor homes, over two-thirds of poor children, whether well-nourished or undernourished, live in a household where no woman has completed six years of schooling. By comparison, just over half live in households where no man has reached the same level of education. The gap widens further among poor children who are out of school: around 82 percent of poor out-of-school children live in households where no woman has completed six years of schooling, compared with 62 percent for households without a man who has reached that threshold. The association between maternal education and child outcomes has long been established in development research, but these figures quantify its scale across the developing world with unusual precision.

Gender disparities in school attendance vary considerably across countries, even though globally more girls than boys are out of school and more boys than girls are undernourished. In 19 countries, which together account for 56 percent of all out-of-school children, girls face higher rates of school exclusion than boys. The largest gaps appear in Afghanistan, where 67 percent of girls are out of school compared with 47 percent of boys, a difference of 20 percentage points. Pakistan follows, with 30.2 percent of girls out of school against 22.3 percent of boys, then the Central African Republic at 29.3 percent versus 21.5 percent, and Guinea at 41.3 percent versus 33.7 percent. These national-level contrasts illustrate how the same global phenomenon can be driven by very different local dynamics.

Amid the deprivation data, the report identifies a genuinely hopeful trend: pioneer children, defined as children aged 10 to 17 who are the only members of their household to have completed six years of schooling. Across the 108 countries studied, 71 million children fit this description. Half of them, 35 million, live in South Asia, where one in nine children aged 10 to 17 is a pioneer. By country, 28 million pioneer children live in India, over 3 million in Bangladesh, 2 million in Pakistan, 837,000 in Nepal, and 508,500 in Afghanistan. Notably, India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh all have higher shares of pioneer girls among girls aged 10 to 17 than pioneer boys among boys of the same age. Only in Afghanistan are pioneer boys more prevalent, at 7 percent of boys versus 4 percent of girls, and half of Afghanistan’s pioneer children are also multidimensionally poor.

The pioneer phenomenon is not without its complications. Globally, 9 percent of pioneer children live in homes where at least one other school-aged child remains out of school, a reminder that even households producing a first-generation learner can still contain children excluded from education. The researchers argue that supporting these young people, who are already breaking intergenerational cycles of low schooling, could mobilise significant change, particularly if programmes recognise the uneven distribution of educational opportunity within the very households that produce pioneers.

Alkire framed the report as a demonstration of what existing data can achieve when individual and household measurements are combined. This is the first study, she said, that shows at scale the possibility and importance of using existing individual data alongside household data to inform evidence-based programmes that meaningfully address cycles of poverty seeded by undernourished and out-of-school children. Invoking the economist Amartya Sen’s insight that nutrition and schooling carry both instrumental and intrinsic value, she called for collaborative work at the local level in measurement and policy to address the systemic deprivations that threaten to trap generations of children in poverty. For policymakers, the report’s central message is that child poverty is not a single problem but a dense web of overlapping deprivations, and that dismantling it requires interventions designed for the way disadvantage actually accumulates within homes.

Subject of Research: Multidimensional child poverty and undernutrition in developing countries

Article Title: 252 million young children in developing countries are undernourished, multidimensionally poor, or both, new global study finds

Article References: 252 million young children in developing countries are undernourished, multidimensionally poor, or both, new global study finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: child poverty, multidimensional poverty, undernutrition, Global MPI, school attendance, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, intra-household inequality, girls' education, South Asia, social protection, stunting, pioneer children

The scale of the population involved is striking. In 2024 alone, nearly three million children in the United States were the subject of a CPS investigation, which can be triggered by suspicions of abuse, neglect, parental substance abuse, or domestic violence. Cumulatively, the researchers note, more than one third of American children will have some contact with CPS before their eighteenth birthday. For Black children, that figure rises above half. Despite these numbers, Ansari observed that the absenteeism literature has almost entirely overlooked this group, a gap he described as surprising given how extensively school absence has been studied in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To close that gap, the team drew on the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal project that has followed 3,334 adolescents across twenty large American cities from birth through age fifteen. The researchers compared families’ reports of school attendance for adolescents who had experienced CPS contact by age fifteen against those who had not, and they paired these attendance records with students’ own reports of how connected they felt to their schools. This dual focus mattered because school connectedness, the sense of being safe, valued, and relationally embedded in a school community, has emerged in prior work as one of the few malleable levers schools can pull to combat absence.

The findings were unambiguous. Students with CPS contact were more likely to be absent from school than their classmates, whether those absences were excused or unexcused, indicating that the disparity is not simply a matter of families failing to prioritize attendance. The differences extended beyond raw absence counts. These students were fourteen percentage points more likely to have teachers reach out to their families about attendance problems, a signal that educators perceive and flag the issue even when its structural roots lie outside the classroom. They also reported feeling measurably less connected to their schools than their peers, a psychological distance that the authors argue both reflects and reinforces the attendance gap.

Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing at least ten percent of instructional time, has long been a concern in American education. In the 2018-19 academic year, fifteen percent of K-12 students were chronically absent. The pandemic then drove national rates to twenty-eight percent in 2021-22, and although they have since declined, they still stood at twenty-four percent in 2024. Against that backdrop, identifying subgroups of students at especially elevated risk has become a central task for researchers and district leaders alike, and the new study suggests that CPS-involved youth belong near the top of that list.

Ansari is careful to frame CPS contact itself as a source of adversity rather than a neutral administrative event. An investigation, even one that does not confirm maltreatment, places a family under heightened surveillance and can strain the very routines, including regular school attendance, that support a child’s development. He describes two common parental responses to that surveillance. Some families disengage, pulling further away from institutions and keeping children home more often to avoid scrutiny. Others react by becoming more diligent, ensuring their children attend school every day. The net effect across the population, however, is a clear elevation in absence risk for CPS-involved youth.

The study also probes whether school connectedness can narrow the attendance gap, and the answer is nuanced. Greater connectedness did explain part of the difference in absences between students with and without CPS contact, confirming that relational factors matter. Yet on its own, school connectedness did not effectively close the gap, because the benefits of feeling connected accrue broadly rather than disproportionately. Interventions that build connectedness, such as fostering positive teacher-student relationships, cultivating inclusive school climates, and expanding access to extracurricular activities, help all children roughly equally. That is valuable, Ansari argues, but it means connectedness programs cannot be expected to single-handedly compensate for the adversity CPS-involved children carry with them through the school door.

Instead, he positions school connectedness as one piece of a larger toolkit that must also address the material conditions shaping attendance. Housing and income instability, food insecurity, and mental and physical health disparities all weigh heavily on the families in the study’s sample. Ansari points to concrete examples: families cutting meals so that children arrive at school hungry and disengaged, or students without bus service who must walk routes their parents consider unsafe because of traffic or crime. These barriers, he notes, are largely driven by poverty, and no school-based relational intervention can fully counteract them. For children dealing with potential abuse or neglect at home, school can serve as a resource and a getaway, a pathway toward higher education and greater opportunity, but it cannot, in his words, counteract all the historical and ongoing forces operating at the same time.

The practical implications cut in two directions. For schools, the message is that attendance strategies should not treat CPS-involved students as simply unmotivated or their families as indifferent, since the absences often track adversity and surveillance dynamics beyond the school’s control. For child welfare systems, the findings suggest that educational continuity deserves explicit attention during and after investigations, given how consequential regular attendance is for grades, test scores, future educational plans, career opportunities, and economic mobility. Ansari also emphasizes the social-relational dimension of schooling, arguing that relationships among students, teachers, and peers are essential to any strategy for tackling absenteeism, and that educators should keep this in mind as they design engagement efforts. The study was co-authored by Kierra M.P. Sattler of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and together the authors call for attendance research and policy to finally account for the millions of children whose lives intersect with the child welfare system.

Subject of Research: The relationship between child protective services contact and school absenteeism and school connectedness among United States adolescents.

Article Title: Kids involved with child protective services miss much more school than their peers

Article References: Kids involved with child protective services miss much more school than their peers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: child protective services, chronic absenteeism, school connectedness, child welfare, educational inequality, school attendance, adolescent development, child maltreatment, poverty and education, student engagement, Ohio State University, Children and Youth Services Review