Children occupy a significant position in economic and other developmental aspects of a society and the level of attention given to them in social policy can be used to judge the welfare system of a society (Pringle, 1998). However, across the globe, children and women are often found to be vulnerable to
poverty and other harsh conditions (Atkinson et al., 2002, Hills and Stewart, 2005, Bradshaw and Finch, 2003, Roelen and Notten, 2011). In Nigeria, women and children form the most vulnerable groups because of cultural practices and traditional beliefs that limit their access to national wealth and social service (Caldwell and McDonald, 1982, Caldwell and Caldwell, 2002). This is the overarching premise on which this study is based. The influence of poverty on assessment of quality in Nigerian educational services seems to provide an overarching perspective to understanding the context of this research.
Over the years, there has been a growing public clamour for children’s right (UNCRC, 1989) to participate in the society as “visible” individuals in their own right. These rights have been adapted into Global South’s social policy. Thus, eradication of child poverty has been broadly advocated by various agencies to enhance children’s development and their integration into the society (Duncan and Brooks‐Gunn, 2000, Bradbury and Jäntti, 2001). Various authors have attempted to measure child poverty in the context of income and other contextual dimensions that relate to the culture of any particular society (Unicef, 2007, Camfield et al., 2013, Roelen, 2011, Alkire and Foster, 2011, Gordon et al., 2000, Bastos and Nunes, 2009). These dimensions include family income, consumption and non-monetary indicators such as social exclusion and deprivation rate (Bastos and Nunes, 2009, Gordon et al., 2000). Other dimensions of poverty in extant literature include health, food security, housing, care and love, social inclusion, access to schooling, freedom from economic exploitation, autonomy and mobility (Biggeri et al., 2010, Gordon et al., 2000). In Europe, the multidimensionality of child poverty incorporates financial and
material possession, housing conditions, parental skill level, access to quality education and family stability, parental health and neighbourhood conditions (UNICEF, 2005, Roelen and Notten, 2011, Richardson et al., 2008, Staff, 2009).
Issues that surround child poverty within extant literature (UNICEF, 2005), view child poverty from diverse perspectives, however towards the same understanding: the deprivation of basic human need for a decent living (Biggeri et al., 2010, Dickerson and Popli, 2015, Onibokun and Kumuyi, 1999, Gordon et al., 2000, Sen, 1999), such as quality education, good housing, health care facilities, material and social skills (UNICEF, 2006). Child poverty is context and time specific and is associated with different social, economic, demographic, political and cultural variables (Roelen and Notten, 2011). In other words, child poverty is a multi-dimensional and complex phenomenon difficult to dissect. Child poverty is endemic in many countries of the Global South and can be described as the cankerworm that damages three critical areas of a child; physical, cognitive and social development (Alkire and Foster, 2011, Unicef and UNICEF, 2015). I simply describe child poverty here as an antecedent of poverty of a nation when such a nation does not give appropriate attention to family and children's welfare, an indispensable component of a society, in its formulation of social policy and as such does not make them feel like recognised member of the society. A situation when a child suffers from inadequacy, insufficiency, deficiency, deprivation, neglect, mal-treatment, denial, malnutrition and un-even distribution of basic physical, social and emotional needs for cognitive, social and physical wellbeing.
Poverty, a global phenomenon with its objective and subjective views, has continued to generate debates in the literature and public discourse, as ‘the poor’ are not a homogenous group (UNDP, 1999). Various measures and indices have been put forward to define and measure poverty (UNDP, 1998; 2001; World Bank 2001; Onibokun and Kumuyi, 1996) from quantifiable perspectives. However, the incidence of scanty and unreliable data in the Global South makes it difficult to rely on these measures as Gordon et al., 2003 advocate for a socially constructed view. Indeed, a UNDP report states that poverty can be absolute or relative in nature depending on income level and access to basic amenities. However, the many definitions that embrace this concept implies that poverty can be perceived as a “cultural” and “socio-political dependent” construct. A World Bank report (2001) attests that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon with context-bound specificity. A study conducted in Nigeria reveals that poverty is significantly constructed as a “social and personal isolation” brought about by a “breakdown of communality principles and reliance on individualistic notion of survival” (Ali-Akpajiak and Pyke, 2003). Individuals are forced to devise means of survival while also faced with competition and social injustice. This suggests that the “poor” see themselves as not recognised as part of the society. They see themselves as being socially excluded from a wider sphere of community life as they are not able to establish relationships outside their cycle. Thus, families begin to perceive education as a means for their children to join the few elite minority. Conversely, when there is no escape route through education, many families devise a means of initiating their children into vocational activities.
An understanding of quality education is interlinked with how society perceives public commitment to bridging disparity in access to national wealth and welfare approach through education, and how individuals position themselves within the existing economic ideals. I consider an understanding of the influence of various dimensions of poverty on educational quality assessment as an imperative approach to the constructing of quality education in Nigeria. Provision and access to “meaningful” and “functional” education has been perceived as a means of ensuring economic prosperity and escaping the poverty trap in many countries of the Global South (UNDP, 2001). On an individual level, education equips individuals with knowledge to manage changes, while on a societal level, educational attainment of a country’s citizens determines how such country is rated on a global development indexes (UNDP, 2001).
An interrelationship that seems to exist between the various dimensions of poverty and quality education can be linked to how a society approaches a commitment to social services and social justice, including fairness in the distribution of resources, and how institutional contexts are in turn influenced by poverty. Social services which include health, education and employment have witnessed a reduced governmental intervention in many countries that are influenced by a neo-liberal agenda (Pringle, 1998) with a significant impact on educational reforms /policy and implementation. Nigeria has followed a neoliberal approach in the development and organisation of early childhood educational systems. However, the outcome seems to present a problematic notion of quality education because of the variability of services and programmes for different social classes that neoliberalism creates. For
instance, in Nigeria, a skew towards neoliberal principles has led to a prevalence of private investment in children’s care and education (Ali-Akpajiak and Pyke, 2003). This action has both positive and negative impacts on social services and human development. Nigeria is found to have made the least progress in child welfare since the inception of various neoliberal reforms of late 1980s (World Bank, 2000).
The depth of the driving factors responsible for child poverty in the countries of the Global North differ from the countries of the Global South (Roche, 2013). Moreover, the proportion of poverty among children varies across countries. For instance, in Finland and Denmark, child poverty rates have been evaluated to be low (Pringle, 1998). In France, Austria, Belgium, Greece and Luxembourg, the rate of child poverty is rated to be within average while in the countries like UK, Portugal, Ireland and Italy have the highest rate of child poverty in Europe (Del Boca, 2009, Unicef, 2007, Bastos and Nunes, 2009, Pringle, 1998). The vulnerability of children to poverty in the latter countries is attributed to low social welfare packages. A study by Dickerson and Popli (2015) posits that multidimensional poverty has a greater detrimental impact on children’s development than income poverty.
In the Global South, child poverty trends grow in multidimensional forms, thus it requires multidimensional approaches to measure and mitigate (Bastos and Nunes, 2009, Biggeri et al., 2010, Wasswa, 2015, Harper, 2010, Unicef, 2011a, UNICEF, 2011b). According to Harper (2010), children in Filipino countries experience high levels of poverty at certain developmental stages when they should not lack proper nutrition and quality education that could enhance their development. In Afghanistan, child poverty is largely caused by several severe
droughts, political insecurity, bad governance and violence with resultant effects on children’s growth and development (Biggeri et al., 2010). In Vietnam, Roelen ’s (2011) study reveals that child poverty is an issue in the context of money, food and multi-dimensional poverty. In Asia, Africa, Sub-Sahara Africa, Pacific, Latin America and Caribbean, a study by Gordon et al. (2000) attempts to rigorously measure the multidimensionality of child poverty using food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education, information and access to services as measurement of child poverty.