Addressing the challenges faced by children in poverty begins with accurate and consistent measurement of monetary child poverty. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 1.2.1 specifies the reporting of the proportion of the population living below the national poverty line, and this should be disaggregated by children. The SDG target is for countries to halve this proportion by 2030.

• Children are twice as likely as adults to be living in poverty, and everywhere their particular life stage makes them more vulnerable to its devastating effects. Poverty in childhood can have lifelong consequences for children’s physical, cognitive and social development. While children themselves suffer the impacts of their poverty most severely and immediately, the repercussions are much wider: altering the paths of societies and economies as a whole.

• The Sustainable Development Goals offer a tremendous opportunity to address and end child poverty. Given the diversity of contexts in which children live, there is no simple universal approach to implementing the SDGs on child poverty.

• However, whichever the context, routine national measurement of child poverty -both monetary and multidimensional -is central. Without knowing how many and which children are living in multidimensional and monetary poverty, we cannot know whether and to what extent we are progressing towards the SDG goal, or the impacts of particular policies and programmes on child poverty.

Read more from the Global Coalition to End Child Poverty.