Leaving No Child and No Adolescent Behind

The future of our world over the next decade is being shaped by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that seek to uphold children’s wellbeing and, by their call to leave no one behind and to reach the furthest behind first, shine a spotlight on the world’s most vulnerable populations including children and adolescents living in poverty and exclusion. The transformative steps promised in the SDGs to ‘shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path’ assumes greater significance in the post-COVID-19 world where structural exclusions are starkly exposed and deep societal inequalities thickly underlined. This volume seeks to address the main drivers of poverty, exclusion, urbanization, and violence against children and adolescents and investigates how knowledge, information, data collection, measurement, and monitoring can support strategies and innovations to effectively implement the SDGs by drawing on data and experience from several countries across the world including Bangladesh, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Malawi, MENA countries, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Suriname, and Thailand. As a result, it contributes to revealing the politics of social inclusion, o?ering policy proposals towards overcoming inequality and exclusion among children and adolescents.

Sudeshna Chatterjee has worked in the international development field for nearly twenty years as a researcher, evaluator, and technical advisor for both non-governmental and UN agencies. She is a consultant to UNICEF, HQ and led the global evaluation of UNICEF’s work on children in cities. Dr. Chatterjee is also the founder and CEO of Action for Children’s Environments (ACE), a knowledge-based non-profit organization. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD intersecting policy, planning and design, environmental psychology, and cultural geography from North Carolina State University. Katie Hodgkinson is a Post-Graduate Researcher at the University of Leeds, working on the Changing the Story project. Her research focuses on arts-based non-formal education programs with young people in post-conflict countries, using a social justice lens to explore the relationship between formal and non-formal education as well as other processes and power dynamics embedded in programs. Katie has previously worked on research projects exploring the social exclusion of vulnerable young people and as part of the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance, funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Alberto Minujin is a professor at the Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School, with a special focus on topics related to social policy and children’s rights. He is the founder of Equity for Children and a member of the Observatory on Latin America at The New School. Minujin was awarded the Argentina Bicentennial Medal in recognition of his contributions to the fields of child rights and social policy. Professor Minujin is the author of many books, articles, and papers about child rights, social policy, and the middle class.

“This is an excellent collection of analytical papers with insights from on-the-ground realities in countries across the world. The papers explore how knowledge, information, data collection, measurement and monitoring make the realities of children’s and adolescents’ lives more visible. What makes the collection inspiring is the passion of the editors and authors in search of new analyses and policies to fight poverty, exclusion, and violence against children.”—Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs at The New School, New York “This important collection of essays and case studies, framed in the context of the SDGs, drills down into some of the specific manifestations of poverty of children and adolescents, which is not just a subset of more general household poverty but has its own specific expressions, with both current miseries and long-term implications. With its granular attention to particular places and particular groups of excluded children and young people, this book greatly expands our understanding of the complexities.”—Sheridan Bartlett, Co-editor, Environment and Urbanization (SAGE) “‘Leaving No Child and No Adolescent Behind’ puts together a compelling set of essays drawing on experiences from primarily low- and middle-income countries, providing in-depth analysis of rich empirical evidence and reflecting on the meaning of ‘inclusion’ for children and adolescents who are often left behind. It reminds us that SDG targets and goals cannot be met unless we focus attention on pockets of inequity and deprivation, such as slums and informal settings in urban areas, that are often masked by urban averages.”—Thomas George, Senior Adviser and Chief of Urban, Programme Division, UNICEF HQ “An impressive contribution that deepens our understanding of how poverty, inequality, and exclusion affect lifetime outcomes for one of the most vulnerable groups in society. The chapters offer unique insights on methods to measure and track progress against SDG targets that focus on children and adolescents. They include rich case studies of approaches that protect, engage, and nurture young people. A must-read for anyone interested in truly inclusive implementation of the SDGs.”—Anjali Mahendra, Director of Global Research, WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities