In 2000, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, commissioned the Townsend
Centre for International Poverty Research to produce the first ever scientific estimates
of child poverty in the developing world. The team, led by Professors David Gordon
and Peter Townsend, was based at the University of Bristol and included Christina
Pantazis, Simon Pemberton and Shailen Nandy. The research formed part of a
UNICEF’s wider “Poverty begins with children” campaign and sought to fill the
considerable information gap on the extent and nature of child poverty around the
world. The preliminary results were published by Gordon et al in 2003 and UNICEF
drew heavily on this research for their 2005 "State of the World's Children Report:
Childhood Under Threat", and the results on child poverty were reported in over 60
countries - both the New York Times and Al Jazeera carried major stories. In the UK
both the Independent and the Guardian devoted their front pages to reporting this
research. Additional funding has been provided by the UK Department for
International Development (DFID) to extend this multidimensional poverty research
for both children and adults to sub-country level. This paper is based on both the
UNICEF and DFID funded research.