Young Lives is an international research project on childhood poverty that was established in 2000 and is coordinated by a team based at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development (Queen Elizabeth House), Great Britain.
Young Lives, by its declaration, is tracing the changing lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam over a 15-year period. This is the timeframe set by the UN to assess progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. Through interviews, group work and case studies with the children, their parents, teachers, community representatives and others, the project is collecting an information not only about their material and social circumstances, but also their perspectives on their lives and aspirations for the futures, set against the environmental and social realities of their communities.
Young Lives is following two groups of children in each country:
- 2,000 children who were born in 2001-02
- 1,000 children who were born in 1994-95.
These groups provide insights into every phase of childhood. The younger children are being tracked from infancy to their mid-teens and the older children through into adulthood, when some will become parents themselves. When this is matched with information gathered about their parents, it is possible to reveal much about the intergenerational transmission of poverty, how families on the margins move in and out of poverty, and the policies that can make a real difference to their lives.
The research concentrates on 4 countries: Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam, chosen because they reflect a wide range of cultural, political, geographical and social contexts. They face some of the common issues experienced by developing countries, such as high debt burden, post-conflict reconstruction and adverse environmental conditions such as drought and flood. By covering these countries, Young Lives aims to reveal patterns, commonalities and differences in four very different contexts where childhood - especially childhood poverty - is changing.
The project is core-funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), with sub-studies funded by International Development Research Centre (IDRC) (in Ethiopia), UNICEF (in India), Irish Aid (in Vietnam) and the Bernard van Leer Foundation (in India and Peru).
Read more about Young Lives: Declared Objectives
Famous quotes containing the words young and/or lives:
“... when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everyone will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses were always hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon to-day has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)