Mainstreaming Child Poverty within the Process and Outcomes of the Sustainable Development Goals

As the period for the Millennium Development Goals came to an end in 2015, the global community was engaged in long and impactful consultations on a successor mechanism and the priorities for poverty eradication in the coming era. End Child Poverty saw in this an opportunity to mobilise around child poverty within the context and language of global efforts to end poverty.

Of special importance for us are:

• Goal 1 – End all forms of poverty
  everywhere
• Goal 4 – Promoting quality education
• Goal 5 Gender Equality -including and end
  to child marriage
• Goal 8 Decent Jobs – including an end to
  child labour
• Goal 16 – Building Peaceful Societies, including an end to violence against children

To realise the opportunities we helped initiate or joined three key 3 advocacy platforms:

• The African Interfaith Initiative on the post 2015 Development Agenda
• The Faith-Based Framework to Realize the Sustain able Development Goals / MoralImperative Initiative
• The Global Coalition to End Child Poverty Mainstreaming Child Poverty in the Global multi-lateral development community

In nearly all instances cited, one key role for End Child Poverty has been to empower, sharpen then help amplify the voice of faith communities and partners in advocating for an end to child poverty. While much of this has been achieved by helping form concrete foundations, we have also sought to lend ourselves to initiatives that hold much promise for our work.

Our experience is that even for organisations with an exclusive mandate for children, child poverty is not always the priority agenda. We have also found that many well-meaning and child-centered organisations lack the conceptual ad methodological clarity on what child poverty is and how to overcome it.