What Works for Africa's Poorest Children: Perspectives on child vulnerabilities and deprivation

This chapter presents and contextualizes the volume and provides a backdrop for the chapters that follow. In line with the What Works for the Poorest (Lawson et., al 2010, 2017) series, we continue our aim of advancing the identification and measurement of the very poorest and vulnerable in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), whilst highlighting some of the programmes, and their design components, that seem to ‘work’. This volume focuses exclusively on children and contains unique methodological approaches in order to assist the most vulnerable and poorest children in SSA issues of heightened importance given the COVID-19 pandemic. As has become customary in the series, we complement the volume with both cross SSA and individual country experiences. We hope to: 1) raise awareness of the problems faced by the poorest and most vulnerable children in Africa; 2) encourage policy makers and development practitioners to identify strategic interventions to move from the measurement of child poverty in all of its dimensions to action; and 3) provide practical examples from a number of African countries that have succeeded in alleviating the burden of poverty and deprivation on children and other vulnerable groups.