Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A comprehensive profile of the poor and deprived that includes age, residence, and other social and demographic characteristics is imperative for social policy design. During the last decade, there have been a series of undertakings in this regard with design and application of multidimensional poverty and deprivation tools in numerous countries world-wide, at different levels of development. This paper assesses the adequacy of the most commonly used surveys, namely the Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey (MICS), the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), and other national socio-economic surveys, for measurement of multidimensional child poverty and deprivation. The analysis is conducted within the framework of the UNICEF Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology, initially designed to measure children’s multidimensional deprivation and well-being. Among other factors, MODA incorporates in its methodology differences in children’s needs based on their age as well as intra-household allocation of resources by focusing on child-level indicators. The indicators used to measure children’s wellbeing stem from the Convention on the Rights of the Child and country-specific national legislation guaranteeing children’s rights for survival, development, and participation. Notwithstanding, the choice of these indicators and dimensions is constrained by data availability. While MICS, DHS, SILC, and other national socio-economic surveys have successfully been used as sources of comprehensive sets of indicators for the application of the Cross-Country and European MODAs, in low-, middle- and high-income countries, practice shows that the measurement of child poverty and deprivation is still constrained in two ways: through scarcity of child-level indicators for children older than five years and inadequacy of indicators in correspondence with the countries’ socio-economic context. By assessing data collection tools – MICS, DHS, and other socio-economic surveys – that contain indicators on child well-being and/or at the children’s level in three middle income countries: Kosovo, Morocco, and Thailand, and reviewing the literature on child well-being measurement in middle and high-income countries, this paper proposes modifications that need to be made to existing data collection tools and systems for improved measurement of child well-being.