CHILDREN, YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT - Development Geography - page 166

completing education, migrating for work opportunities or achieving
the financial means to marry and support their own families may be
delayed because of their caring responsibilities (Evans, 2011). These
examples reveal the complexity and interdependent nature of youth
transitions in the global South.

key points

• Children and young people have often been marginalized within
development processes, despite the prominence of children's rights
discourses and indicators of child health, education and welfare
within global development targets.
• Age intersects with other social identities, such as gender, race, eth-
nicity, disability, rural and urban differences and wider global pro-
cesses to produce diverse childhoods and complex pathways to
adulthood.
• International concern about child labour has focused on more visible
forms of children's paid work and neglected the gendered- and
age-related impacts of children's social reproductive work within the
family.
• 'Education for All' policies, initiatives and MDG targets have helped
to increase primary school enrolment rates and reduce gender dis-
parities in many low income countries, but poverty, structural con-
straints affecting the quality of education and gender discrimination
continue to restrict young people's (especially girls') access to educa-
tion and educational outcomes at all levels.

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further reading

Ansell's Children, Youth and Development (2005) and Wells' Childhood
in a Global Perspective (2009) provide detailed discussions of global
constructions of childhood and youth in relation to development,
including children's rights, work, education, youth transitions and partici-
pation. Bourdillon's (2004) article in Progress in Development Studies gives
a good introduction to children's participation in development, while
Aitken's (2001) article in Area reflects on the historically and geographi-
cally contingent nature of childhood and youth. Panelli et al.'s edited
collection, Global Perspectives on Rural Childhood and Youth (2007),