SDG 1: No Poverty | SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare
A comprehensive study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) utilizing 21 years of longitudinal data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) reveals that childhood poverty has profound, long-lasting impacts on adult outcomes across consumption, education, and health. Moving beyond traditional money-metric poverty measures, the research employs a multi-context deprivation framework that evaluates four distinct domains: family economic, family social, community economic, and community social. The findings indicate that 40% of the sampled population experienced multi-context deprivation, which is significantly correlated with lower adult consumption (28.1% less), reduced educational attainment (a loss of 2.5 years of schooling), and impaired cognitive skills.
Crucially, the study finds that adverse adult outcomes are shaped not only by the family environment but also by community-level deprivation. While family factors generally exert a stronger influence on economic and educational success, community factors—such as infrastructure and local social organizations—play a more dominant role in determining long-term health status, mental health, and life satisfaction. Gender heterogeneity is also significant: girls’ education suffers more from community-level social deprivation, whereas boys’ health is hit harder by economic shocks, suggesting that community biases and resource allocation prioritize boys’ education and boys’ physical health differently during times of hardship.
What is ‘Multi-Context Deprivation’ in childhood development? It is a holistic measurement framework that assesses the environment in which a child grows up across multiple layers—the immediate household and the broader community—and through both economic and social lenses. Unlike traditional poverty measures that focus solely on family income, multi-context deprivation accounts for factors such as parental literacy and physical presence (family social), as well as access to primary schools, asphalt roads, and community social organizations (community social/economic). This approach recognizes that a child’s future is shaped as much by the infrastructure and social capital of their neighborhood as by their parents’ bank balance.
Policy Relevance
India, like Indonesia, faces significant challenges related to childhood poverty, intergenerational mobility, and gender inequality — the findings of this paper therefore have several implications for India. The study underscores that income transfer programs alone may be insufficient to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, necessitating a shift toward multi-sectoral interventions that address both family and community-level deficits.
Holistic Poverty Alleviation: India’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and schemes like Lakhpati Didi can benefit from integrating “community-social” metrics—such as the density of Self-Help Groups (SHGs)—to better predict and mitigate long-term developmental lags in children.
Urban and Rural Infrastructure: The finding that community infrastructure (roads and electricity) significantly predicts adult health and life satisfaction reinforces the long-term human capital returns of missions like PM Gram Sadak Yojana and Saubhagya.
Addressing Gendered Educational Gaps: To combat the finding that community distress disproportionately affects girls’ education, targeted interventions like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao should incorporate community-level “social support” audits to identify and fix localized biases.
Strengthening Primary Healthcare (PHC): Since community factors dominate health outcomes, the expansion of Ayushman Arogya Mandirs (Health and Wellness Centers) acts as a critical community-level buffer against the negative health impacts of family-level economic hardship.
Follow the full report here: Long-Term Outcomes of Multi-Context Childhood Poverty: Evidence from Long Panel Data from Indonesia