It's a great pleasure to have you all here with us today.
I'm Joe Boyd and I'm the recently retired director of Young Lives, and I'm just here really to introduce the event.
The main event really is about the country directors for young lives,
sharing their experiences of governance and impact and the challenges, opportunities and strategies that they've evolved over time.
We're going to start with some short presentations. I will give a little bit of the background of the study, a little bit of its history,
and then they will take over the three country directors will take over, give presentations, will then have a short discussion between the four of us.
I will open to the floor for questions and I want you to feel free to ask anything that's that.
This is a rare opportunity to have three country lectures from three very different countries in the room,
so please feel free to ask any questions that come to mind. So really, just to start by explaining a little bit about what young lives is.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with our work, but the important thing about your lives is it is a longitudinal study.
Its comparative it's in four countries Ethiopia, India, not nationally in India, but in united Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Peru and Vietnam.
It's mixed methods, so we have both qualitative and survey research, and we also have quite a few child measures.
We're at the household child and at school level, so it's quite a complex study.
It was established in 2000 2001 with an initially with a 15 year horizon.
However, we've managed to keep it going longer than that and we have some funding to continue some aspects of it.
There are 12000 children in the study who were recruited initially.
We're interviewing the children and their households, their primary caregivers, and in the qualitative research,
we have a sub sample from those same children who were doing research with both their peers and with other community members as well.
And we also have over 30000 children involved in the school effectiveness research, which was introduced a little later in 2010.
And as much as possible, we've tried to recruit into the school effectiveness research children who were also in our household study.
It's a little challenge, doesn't always work, but we've tried to do that as far as possible.
And I just want to say the reason why we introduced the school effectiveness research was because through the first rounds of the study,
we began to realise very quickly just how fundamental education was to these children's lives,
to their sense of aspirations, their hopes for the future, their time, use and so on.
That may seem self-evident, but it wasn't when the study was begun,
because at that point we weren't even sure how many children were attending school.
So this was one of the adaptations, if you like that, we made along the way with the learning that we did with the with the research.
The aim behind young lives always was applied.
It was always about generating evidence, longitudinal evidence to advance understanding of childhood poverty, but also to improve policy and practise.
So engagement with policy and practise has been an objective throughout the study,
and that's both working with national governments and nationally in the study countries,
but also globally with global institutions that support local policy development.
It was set up in effect, is timed with the Millennium Development Goals.
It was really set up to monitor, monitor performance of the development goals and the countries that were chosen were chosen with some
consideration and thought there were something like 24 countries in the original on the original list.
The idea was to have a diversity of countries facing very different challenges at different stages of economic development.
One from each of the major risk regions in developing regions so that you could
really get a sense of of the performance of the MDGs across those different regions.
It now, of course, provides a baseline for the Sustainable Development Goals.
So we've transitioned into a whole new policy era, if you like.
I just want to say a little bit about governance of young lives. It is an extremely large and complex programme of research.
There are 80 sites. Well, I should say there are 80 sites to start with the 80 sites across the four countries.
But of course, as the children migrate,
you create a lot more than 80 sites because we try to track the children as much as possible to everywhere that they migrate to.
We've had five survey rounds, four waves of qualitative research into two waves of the school effectiveness research.
This is a very large volume of data. It's a very large exercise in data gathering and research design and so on.
And there are really five key components to the study.
On the one hand, you've got the data, which is at the heart of the whole thing, which involves data gathering,
the management of of the data gathering processes and the management of the transition of the data towards public archiving.
All the survey data and school effectiveness data are archived publicly and available to anybody for research.
The qualitative data is not publicly archived. Of course, key to all of this are the research outputs and the dissemination of the research.
I haven't kept a tally, but I know that there are over 800 publications.
That's if you like formal publications and that doesn't include all the social media and other outputs that that are generated by the study.
So it's really important for us to have a strong communications component as much as possible.
We have that at both country level and also globally.
And communications management messaging is a quite a challenging thing to do
because the topics that the study covers are very broad everything from health,
nutrition, education, time, use, cognition and all kinds of other topics.
Beside that, most recently, things like Violence, Gender-Based Violence, other forms of violence and exploitation.
So communications,
I've separated out from policy engagement in the study countries and globally because that's where we really interact with the key stakeholders,
the policymakers and the practitioners that we're trying to influence.
We also have a capacity building component, which is really important.
That's not just the capacity of young lives, staff and partners and so on to to to really fulfil to the maximum their roles.
It's also about building the capacity of policymakers and other stakeholders to use evidence in their planning and so on.
It's not always the case that policymakers use evidence in making their decisions,
so it's been very important to us to create that enabling environment a receptive environment for the research messaging.
The study moved to Oxford.
We took the study over in 2005, and key to the staffing in Oxford was the position of the director, programme manager or chief operating officer.
This is an absolutely crucial role, and I always make a big thing about it with research is how important it is to have
programme management skills because of the complexity of the contracts there's.
There's so much going on in this study.
It was always a very central role that we have and research, communications, data and administrative staff as well.
In in Oxford. We are a partnership across these four countries, but we also have partners, partners in the United States and in other universities.
UCL, for example, in the UK. And the partnership approach, I would suggest, is probably one of the most important aspects of our success, I think.
So we don't work with survey companies in any of our context.
We work with long term partners. And indeed, some of the partners in the project have been in this study longer than I have.
So that longevity continuity is fundamental to our work.
We appointed country directors along the way, three of whom are with us.
The country director, unfortunately for Vietnam, wasn't able to join us.
But the important thing is that we did that again because of the learning.
Along the way, we suddenly realised just how fundamental it would be to have that really strong leadership and representation at the country level.
So that was an important transition point for us.
We have multiple donors.
The core funding comes from the Department for International Development, and they have contributed somewhat over 30 million pounds to date.
And we also have many other donors, some of which are quite small, that come with very specific interests and very particular research topics.
Which in itself is quite a management exercise. And I think it's really important to say we've been incredibly lucky.
I'm well aware that many longitudinal studies in the world do not have this long term commitment to the core.
Funding and funding is often the most challenging aspect of their work.
Many of them are forced to raise funds per round, and that's extraordinarily destabilising in the kind of work that we do.
So I just thought that was another important point to make. So I'm now going to handover over.
We're going to start. I'm going to just introduce everybody now, and we're going to run through the presentations one after the other.
And then we'll be having the discussion following the presentations.
The first presentation is going to be given by Professor Santiago Quetzal from Peru.
He's the country director for Peru. Santiago is an educationalist and a psycho nutrition and brings enormous wealth of experience,
both in research and also in policy engagement to the study.
And indeed, he has led on a lot of the the work related around psychometrics and school and education.
We then have Ranasinghe Dr. Ranasinghe following him.
Reno is the country director for India, and Reno is a Montessori teacher and an early childhood education expert.
She's come with a very strong background, not just in research, but also in the world of policy engagement,
and has long interactions with international and local NGOs in India.
And finally, we have a Lula Pankhurst. Lula is the country director for Ethiopia.
He is. He is Ethiopia's foremost ethnographer.
He speaks multiple language Ethiopian languages.
He is an expert in community community change processes.
And he's been holding us to look all the time at the way in which the context in which
these young people are growing up are massively changing and dramatically changing.
What kinds of impact is that having on their lives?
And he's always saying, we need to keep interrogating this area of our work, so it gives me great pleasure to hand over to Santiago.
Thank you, Joe. Nobody introduced Joe, so I should say she's a professor here and anthropologist and has led the project for the past 15 years,
like you heard and has been the leader in in in several ways of that project for which we are all very grateful.
Thank you, Joe. And I've been with young life since a little bit before October started leading this project at around 2004 for round two.
And this is, you know, you can imagine coming from a developing country,
being able to participate in a society that sees children grow in so many ways with two cohorts is a.
A luxury and intellectual stimulation, but also a challenge in the way that Joe was mentioning that we are asked not only to produce papers,
good ones and publish them and so forth, present them at conferences, but also to have an influence in policy.
And that also has changed. I was thinking about is when I was presenting the this presentation.
So for example, in Peru, around the time we started, half of the population or more would be under the poverty line.
And now it's about 20 percent for the past few years.
So monetary, I mean, monetary policy.
But of course, Young Lives is a project that looks at poverty from a mighty, multi-dimensional perspective.
So some of the issues have changed and we have been investigating for the most part over the past few years
issues of inequality as opposed to the issues we were raising at the beginning of the of the project.
So how do we do this in Peru? And these are that well in Peru, we call it Ninos, Nina the millennium for those who speak Spanish.
So this is a free translation, of course, of your lives.
Somebody decided this was a better translation and work in Peru, and we have our own logo and identity and we work.
I work at Garani. You can see here, but also we're working in partnership with Nutritional Research Institute.
And these days, we got supporting.
Aside from that of the effort that Jo was mentioning from the foundational diet that allows us to carry on doing analysis of the data we have.
OK. So how is it that we managed to have an impact or try to have an impact?
Then it's always difficult that perhaps we can go back to this issue at a discussion.
Because sometimes we were asked, how do you demonstrate that we have an impact and an on policy, on other issues and we have some, you know,
quotes and meetings and so forth that I'm going to try to present to you plus others, but it's always a challenge to try to keep a record on that.
So I'm going to talk about these four strands of work dissemination, capacity building,
advocacy and branding, and this has worked very nicely because we had, I think,
if I may say so because we have had communicators, journalists working alongside with research,
trying to get the key messages out of what we were finding, which is not always easy.
Sometimes researchers tend to say, So what is it that you found?
Well, we found in general terms this and then they generally say, So can I say this?
Well, it all depends, and aid may vary amongst things how you get messages that are not all that clear.
And that's the interaction that has been interesting. So moving on to dissemination, for example, we've had an electric newsletter since 2009.
We have around three thousand subscribers and reaching specialised audiences.
We have been participating in events that have, in some cases, massive participation,
and I guess the general goal in these efforts and we could say a few more activities has been to alert people about young lives.
And I could say that after all these years, it has become sort of a brand name in Peru.
So people know about these projects and. I would like several audiences not necessarily to become researchers themselves, but to be users of research,
and for that we present study sometimes in papers, but sometimes in policy briefs, and we use social networks to present some of the key findings.
And one audience that I have tried, especially to reach in Peru, is the next generation of professionals.
So oftentimes you have university students in classes where they read these manuals with theories on that are often translated from the North.
Sometimes written in Spanish, but it's not often that they look at research and analyse the tables and or qualitative information,
and so we're trying to get to them and I think we have succeeded.
In some cases, we have thousands of downloads of a few of our papers, for example, in terms of capacity building.
We started this a few years ago in something that caught up quickly in Peru.
We started developing this workshop three day workshops on how to use young lives,
data targeting students in graduate studies, policy makers working in officers, working with data professors at universities.
And we have had. Hundred and sixty professionals trained on how to use a young life,
they and we're keeping that because that's one of the things we presented to this foundation.
They said we were like this, we think we need to do this more.
Of course, this is a unique database in Peru and for many other countries, a longitudinal database such as this one.
But capacity building sometimes extends beyond Peru,
and some of us are often called or sometimes have been called to several countries around Latin America,
mostly that are trying to carry out their own longitudinal study.
And they I guess the main question is how have you succeeded in working on this for so many years?
And what should we think about now that could anticipate what's going to come in a few years and so forth?
So and of course, the surveys and databases are available for public use in our web page.
And I don't know. Here are a couple of examples. Gil Melendez was an assistant for one of our senior researchers,
and it's an interesting story because he started very young at young lives as a research assistant, got to work with a database.
It allowed him to be co-author.
His efforts allowed him to be called for in a few other papers, which allowed him to get a scholarship to do a master's in economics.
And now he's back working at the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion working in Kumtor,
which is exactly the project that he was working on with the senior researcher Alan Sanchez.
So I don't know. We feel this is some one of a circle and we have a quote from him here,
and this is one of the UP-AND-COMING young professionals that we have a lot of faith on and several examples like this.
This is another one in Peru. I'm going to come back to this, but social sciences are not part of the research agenda from the national agency,
so science is mostly the hard sciences and what they think are economically productive sciences.
But it's starting to change now when we have some funds.
And so this professor from university in Adichie Park in the south of Peru invited Alan again to work with with them and did a workshop.
But we knew it went beyond that. So this is an interesting pilot experience where he's trained with them,
where he is working with some researchers to write a few papers and get them published.
And so we'll go through the whole process in Peru and many other countries.
I guess you can be a professor without necessarily having published any academic paper,
although universities are supposed to do a lot of research, but there's no not much development on the house.
So we're very grateful to this colleague of ours, Alejandro Tyler, who's very smart and dedicated advocacy.
I'll tell you a couple of words. I mean, we use research, so how do we get some messages to influence policy, but at the same time,
do not sound like an institution that it's promoting some causes no matter what or some form of activism.
So we had to develop research based messages, and that's somewhat of a challenge.
And one of the ways that we think have worked well is having this roundtables to establish dialogues between
academics and policy makers where we present some of the main results of the study and we invite the minister,
vice minister or head of any of the offices that are relevant for this programme.
And we present the results and they go around saying, what is it that it means for them?
And they talk about some of their initiatives on, for example,
teenage pregnancy and try to establish in a way a community of academics and policy
makers that know each other and can collaborate on exploring the meaning of this.
So that policy goes beyond just whatever the president or the minister at the time is saying should happen to look at the data and,
you know, policy based evidence. So and we get called because as I mentioned, we.
Establish a brand and establish a name for ourselves and for great here in a lot of way,
things to young lives, better to also other stories also so several of our researchers has been,
have been or are members of the board of the Central Reserve Bank National Fiscal
Council or advising the Ministry of Women and Social Affairs or Minister of Economics,
National Council of Education, and sometimes internationally, the Advisory Board for the Global Education Monitoring Report and so forth.
And so it's very interesting to have these exchanges because you discuss what is it that the evidence say and the policy makers is going to say.
But we need to make a decision right now, and we only have so much resources.
And then an interesting and challenging dialogue is established now and branding.
I've been mentioned about this, but we have a brochure and we have a website.
I was asking my communications person, what is a UX design? And I'm not going to be able to explain it well,
but has to do with the easiness on how to explore that data in a website, by topics, by specific projects.
And it's all quite new.
So if you want to take a look at it in Spanish and make a comment for us, that would be wonderful.
And here are some examples of we have videos in this search engine that I was talking about and the different types of publication.
At the end of round five, for example, we did a different challenges to publish our summaries or synthesis.
What does it all mean? And I work mostly new location like Joe was saying.
And so I tried to think of a message to get through to to policymakers, and one of the things I've been saying, for example,
is we know that socioeconomic characteristics and educational resource are linked,
but the channels through which they are linked are not always that clear, at least in Peru.
So I've tried to develop a series of paper trying to exemplify those channels
and in the way of educational opportunities showing that socioeconomic status,
for example, wealth at each one can predict the quality of your schools at age 11 or even age 15.
So 14 or 15 years later and the quality of the school they find in several specific ways, of course, for research.
And this is also linked with vocational results.
So if we want to have a system that is more fair, then we need to make educational opportunities more equal.
So that's the way in my case.
But if Alan Sanchez were here on this programme, we're here.
They could tell you about teenage pregnancy and so forth. Well, challenges Latin America is no longer a priority.
We reach, you know, we started as a lower income country and now we're a middle income country.
Peru's even a higher middle income country, but it's a country where we have a lot of inequality.
And as I said, as I suggested before, the national saying, teachers should pick up and invest,
but it's not investing in social science that for that, well, so it's lobbying.
And this year they're starting with a very modest fund, but they are starting to invest in research in social sciences.
Inequality is a huge problem in Latin America.
You must have seen all the protests in Chile, for example, and we're sometimes expecting those kinds of protests in Peru also.
And we hope that through research influencing policy, we may be helpful in finding ways to make system policies more fair and more just for everybody.
And if you want a visit in Spanish, there you go, or in English, the web page.
And I think that's it. I don't know. How am I doing with that? Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for coming. So we're going to just I'm going to continue the conversation that Santiago just
began by sharing all the challenges as well as the strategies they adopted in Peru.
India's very different context. And as Joe mentioned in India, we're only into southern states.
Actually, we began in one southern state.
By default, we become two because of the bifurcation of united Andhra Pradesh nine to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
So we are in just Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Just meaning yes, compared to the other countries, we do have limited presence.
So you mentioned, I just want to reiterate some of the features of the longitudinal study, which actually proved very advantageous to us.
The fact that it has a life course perspective means that, you know, we're we're able to talk to different ministries and departments.
You know, it's so right in the beginning, which was the focus was nutrition and health.
Education then became the focus, but continued health continued.
And of course, women and child department and the Ministries of Women and Child Ministry of Social
Justice because of all the inequalities and how minorities need to become the focus.
So we've had a chance. Actually, I see this as a huge advantage because we're able to therefore through the life, you know,
life course perspective as children are index children grew up, we changed our focus areas and we were able to talk to many of these departments.
Of course, I think the fact that you know, we have, we have we look at disaggregated data.
We have, you know, definitely at the state level, we have a good sample in terms of cost in terms of, you know, it's a proper sample.
So we have taken more samples from poorer members, which is our sentinel sites in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana.
So when we speak, of course, we can't speak a generalisation of our findings.
So that's a challenge, right? We can't generalise to the country and say these are findings which we can generalise to the rest of India.
But yes, I think for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana,
which somewhere feature in the middle of the round in terms of performance of states, it talks to the averages.
And so we have we are able to talk to policymakers and they listen to the trends that we are observing.
And I think that's that's how we approach policy.
Yes, we do have a very holistic view of child on adolescence and our youth because now our cohorts are 26 and 19 in this round,
so they know more children actually. So we've moved away from and in fact, the next phase of young lives is young lives at work.
That's how we're looking at it. Mixed methods.
Huge advantage to my mind because we've had several subpar studies to actually focus on policy issues which were critical to be answered,
which sometimes we can't answer only from the quantitative analysis.
So the mixed methods approach has been, you know, an advantage to take forward the policy discourse.
And again, our donors were constantly asking us, what is the impact of the research on both programming and policy?
So policy influencing and programme influencing programmes, meaning partners, other partners working on programming?
How are we influencing them?
So like I said, we only and only in those two states in the India challenge, because how do you therefore reach policymakers and speak to them?
Also, in the early years, there was very limited understanding of amongst policymakers and even many researchers of what
the longitudinal data might be able to provide you what the evidence might be able to tell you.
And of course, I think the other issue was in the early years, that's when the, you know, round one,
round two, we always had communication people, but I don't think we had too much to communicate.
In hindsight, I think if I were doing a longitudinal study, I think investments have to be made definitely round three onwards.
That's when you have this wealth of information emerging, and that's when you need to go out and disseminate.
In the early years, we had our common communication and policy people sitting with a third but third party partner.
I think that proved a disadvantage.
But very early on we realised that because that is the researchers who can actually go out there and communicate their findings.
So you needed to have them sitting with your team. And even if I think we had a Santiago Santiago talk about how.
Journalists and his team were a huge advantage. But these journalists have to be sitting within the team understanding and having
those chats with you to be able to actually turn the research into those key messages,
which are easily digestible because they have to be made accessible.
And I think that's the biggest challenge we we face. How do we go out there?
And in that elevator pitch, talk to that policy maker in a couple of minutes over cups of chai, of course, but able to get across to them.
And so I think we realise that some of these messages were getting lost until we moved the team,
the communication and the policy positions back within our own core team.
So that was a learning for us. So some of the strategies which I'm going to share, so we've we set up the country offices.
Like I said, policy communication was integral to the country office at Delhi.
So that's where most of the policies are made. So even though we had our study in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana,
we set up the central office in Delhi and we were able to then have these constant interface and engagement with the ministries,
the central ministries, as well as the state government.
So we were able to do this double, you know, engagement with with both the departments and the ministries.
And that, I think, was crucial in being able to move forward with our agenda of policy influencing.
It also meant doing a lot of work outside the research, which meant often you were asked, OK, the Working Group on early childhood development,
making a policy on CCS, or would you be part of the working group to come up with the policy?
Of course, it's outside the purview of the research that we were doing, but because we were on that group,
we were able to make sure all the evidence went into that policy in formulating the policy.
With so many hours of work which one didn't think of being part of the joint review missions of the Ministry of Human Resource Development,
which meant you actually went and looked at the social beyond,
which is elementary education programme,
or that the Teacher Education Programme and reviewed state performance and audited state programmes for the ministry outside the purview directly of,
of course, the work. But I think at the country level, we had complete freedom to take on these pieces of work.
I know Joe was our director, but I don't think, Joe, you have a question.
That's why we were spending 10 days in the field doing an audit for Sal Shihab and often twice in a year.
But that's what actually gets you a seat on the table. Actually,
that's when they start taking you seriously because you're writing the reports and the ground
reports are really critical because an action taken report has to be given six months later,
and you can ask the government questions on what action has been taken.
So sometimes it's these you know, you are in the steering committee of the 11th planning and not by the way,
no Five-Year Plans are made in our country any longer, so we are no longer on the table.
But until the 12th Five-Year Plan, if you were on the steering committee, you were able to therefore squeeze in.
Can you please start tracking all children, vulnerable children if you put that into the plan?
Nobody notices at that time, but then you could ask questions and say, What are you doing about it?
Right? So these are the ways of actually wrangling a position.
And we also, I think what really helped us with setting up a national advisory board at the country level,
these were mainly people from the ministries at the state level as well as the national.
Some national universities, academics of high repute, Tata Institute,
the National University of Education, Planning and administration partners like UNICEF Save the Children.
So partners, I think that it also there is a larger ownership.
Like I said, we not just had to influence policy, but our mandate was also influencing programming.
So we were able because these were partners coming on to our advisory board.
They also we developed a relationship where we could actually go in and say,
You're developing your strategy, your country strategy for the next five years.
How can we support you? And they would call us onto the table to do that.
We also had huge amount of, I think, flexibility by our donors and new donors coming in beside Difford as well.
We, you know, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights acknowledged Young Lives India as a technical partner,
which meant we were able to support them in making their strategy plans and looking at their documents and in doing research for them.
We don't, by the way, take money from the government, but we do work for the government.
So we would now we would obviously never need a donor to help us write the report and do the research, even if it was secondary research.
But it became a Government of India document rather than.
Document, which is what is more important than publishing your own papers.
And in this instance, the fact that we had 37 percent of our older cohort married by 19 and 28 percent by the age before the age of 18,
shook up the Ministry of Women and Child, as well as NC PCR to say, Can you do an analysis of the census, which we did for them with support from CIF?
And then that became a government policy document because it was published by them.
So we've been able to. So like I said, I think the fact that we had flexibility to respond to policy make those demands outside
of just the core longitudinal analysis has also been a huge way of impacting policy.
We've also built lots of networks.
We've done data usage workshops, often with national universities, say, for educational planning and administration,
where they will call them department heads from different universities from across the state.
So we don't spend any money. We just go in there and we say we will be our resource people and you organise a two day data usage workshop.
Similarly, and Data Institute and Institute of Education brought in IGAD.
Ah, so they will invite us and we will go, and we will just run the workshop for faculty members, particularly in India.
If your faculty members don't know how to use the data, they're not going to be able to support their doctoral students.
So that's that's the challenge.
And today we have about 35 doctoral dissertations coming out of the Young Lions data from India, which I think is a big step forward.
Similarly, you know, we've we've had networks with.
So Joe mentioned UCL novella was a project that we we had a collaboration with with them on.
And we similarly, you know, this is the picture.
Here is the the secretary for image and asked where we had the School Effectiveness Survey dissemination
roundtables on childhood poverty happening on the on the left hand side in the corner of the upper corner.
So we constantly try and put together roundtables, have conversations and dialogues,
as Santiago mentioned with policymakers in the room, because there is no point of having the convert to talk to just each other.
So we make sure that we have the policymaker in the room. Otherwise, there's no point having these meetings.
I think what's also very important as we just don't look at the policymakers in that way for
us district level dissemination and even disseminating and sharing what we call reciprocity,
even with our communities where we work with the children who we work with,
I think we can do this all without the children and families who are involved in this study.
So I think just to give you this quote from in round five, we went back to the children and we made a little booklet with stories,
profile child profiles, which of course, anonymized from all the four countries and children.
You know, read the books. And they were really thrilled to read the little books and said, Oh my God, I've been part of a study like this, right?
And these are the quotes from them. I wish people would buy and read the book.
They put it up for sale. Of course it wasn't. There's so many books out there, but I sincerely wish that people will read this book.
My participation helped me understand about the research. It's to improve policies.
They would often ask us what's in it for me in the beginning, right? What is in it for me?
If you don't give them anything that when we were telling them,
we thought we were saying goodbye in the fifth round and some of them actually cried and especially the children and said,
really said, What do we do for you? When you listen to us? You know, that's why I think it's just that space children get.
And we are really lucky that we've had very low attrition.
Yesterday, we were looking at the trekking in Peru and India, which just got over.
I think you've got last less than five or six percent attrition.
I think we have less than one percent attrition between the last round and it's amazing
and it's because of the surveyor's and the commitment and the dedication of the team.
I think that's we owe it all to them completely.
We also learn to engage with stakeholders who traditionally we didn't engage with people like the judiciary.
And really, this again, I'm going to say I'm not going to take this, that, you know, this was strategic and thought of, not at all.
In fact, the NTPC asked us, Why don't you invite justice LaCour when we were, you know,
disseminating the census report and just as Lakota, as a Supreme Court judge.
And I said, Sure, let's call him. I wasn't sure what it would do.
But just as local came on his.
You know, we make judgements regarding child marriage all the time, and why haven't you come and showed us these findings at the Supreme Court?
So he organised a meeting of the Supreme Court where we we shared the evidence.
It also happened to be a Government of India report. Remember, it was in our report.
So the logo was also the government of India. And lo and behold, the next we had, you know, a High Court ordered this.
We had a High Court, a Supreme Court judgement on 11th October 2017 from a double bench,
which ordered this report several times, which criminalised sex with a minor wife.
And when I spoke to the judges, they said, You know,
it's the report really helped us understand what young girls who are forced into marriages go through.
So this was like a deterrent, you know, to stop child marriage. I'm getting a sign from, OK, I'm going to just play this.
This is meet the eye of the seal at the launch of the last round just to end.
First of all, I'm delighted to be here.
On the occasion of the very unique study, and let me first congratulate the young lives for this very, very comprehensive study to my mind, you know,
the key features of this research component in the study in quantitative research with
five survey rounds of all 2000 children and their caregivers and community leaders.
And then the qualitative research with in-depth interviews with a small group of 48 children and their peers and parents,
and to school service at its primary and secondary conducted in private and government schools.
It is a very, very comprehensive, very in-depth, two very comprehensive, very detailed study.
And this brings out very sharp lessons for all of us,
and longitudinal studies like this are truly invaluable for us to assess and to reassess what
to measure at a national scale and to understand the issues our policies have to address.
Since this study measures the foundation it causes of poverty the children grow up with.
It also gives us, in many ways, the tools to unlock wealth for them, and I think it's very,
very important because studies like this was put out in public domain.
OK, well, let's stop here. So thank you very much.
So the advantage of going last is that you get a chance to hear what the others have said and not have to speak about that.
And actually, we didn't look at each other's presentations and in many ways what we're talking about is very similar, but also very different.
And it also meant that the kinds of issues that Santiago talked about in terms
of capacity building are very much echo with what we were doing in Ethiopia,
but I don't need to talk about that. And likewise, Randall was talking a lot about engagement with communities and with senior politicians,
which also we have been doing, but I am not going to be talking about in this presentation.
I want to talk to you about two aspects of the work in in Ethiopia.
First of all, the challenges and opportunities of the scale of this endeavour of trying to work across countries,
across sites, across disciplines, across different sectors.
So both in terms of space, but also in terms of time over this long period.
The hallmarks of the approach in an observational way.
And then move on more specifically to the impact challenges with the way in which the whole ideology of impact imposes constraints on us,
on the challenges, working with government and working with the larger players that influence the context in which we work
and suggesting that we need to think of a different way of working and a more collaborative approach.
So in Ethiopia, The Young Lives, a study that has more countries that have progressed in many ways and are seen as models.
So the Asian countries are very much ones that are looked up as examples of having moved up to middle income status.
And that's the ambition in Ethiopia. So when we look at the mid-day meal in India or we look at the pre-school approaches in other countries,
those are things that the Ethiopian government can look up to.
But of course, then always there is that tension of feeling that the resources are not there and that there are specificities in the country.
And Ethiopia is not like anywhere else in the world.
And sort of the eyes glaze over after a while when we try to provide evidence from other countries.
So it is it is quite a challenge. And then we have 20 sites, but then people say, Oh, well, it's five regions.
What about the other regions? And there's the specificity of the particular sites.
There are the urban rural contrasts and we have the different regions.
And because we wanted to continue to follow the children over so long,
we didn't go to the agro pastoralist areas that were much more difficult to keep that kind of continuity.
And as Randy was saying, young lives has managed to have quite a lower attrition.
There's also the fact that these places are changing extremely dramatically.
So one of the sites is this massive plastic factory that is being built bang next to the site.
So the site is going to change really dramatically. And this round we're looking at labour issues.
So wage labour and so forth is going to change. And the other the other site in in that in the capital city, one of the sites is a very poor area.
So there was a a bias towards selecting more areas that were poor and food insecure in the rural areas.
And this site has now been completely knocked down. And so the children have moved to other areas.
And eight years ago, we did a study talking to them about what they thought about neighbourhood and what
they thought about moving to other areas and living in these new condominiums.
And now, right now, as I speak, we're going to look for them and we found that they are indifferent.
They move scattered to other areas in two particular concentrations.
So all these changes are quite important challenges in trying to understand how these communities are changing,
how the lives of children are changing.
So it's a project that is allegedly an ostensibly and claims to be mixed methods, but of course, in many of these large scale projects,
the quantitative side tends to dominate with the all statistics,
even though in terms of communicating our messages, the empathy that we can get, the readers,
particularly policymakers that can look at stories, live stories, the pictures, even though they're not necessarily the pictures,
they're not pictures of the children that we study,
but ones in similar circumstances due to the ethical concern with not with keeping the anonymity of our respondents.
These are very compelling. So this kind of being able to juggle between this large scale statistics and the stories is really extremely important.
Even though I think as a study, it's quite difficult for us to be genuinely interdisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary.
So I'm being very open about this criticism from somebody that's on the qualitative side.
And even in the design, there were five rounds of quantitative survey and only four rounds of waves of qualitative research.
Although in Ethiopia we have done a fifth round now and now round six.
There is funding to continue with the work, but only so far for the quantitative side.
So one has to acknowledge that in these large scale projects, the economic, statistical,
large scale approach tends to dominate over what in terms of policy and communication terms, is often what really makes the difference.
And then the cross-sectional aspect that Erin was talking about a lot the interaction between between sectors.
So being able to talk across these different sectors is extremely important in the life cycle and a holistic approach.
But it's extremely difficult because of the way in which so much of both the way government
works and the way that the donor community works is is very much siloed in particular areas.
So for instance, Rand, who talked a lot about child marriage and likewise we did a lot on this.
So a long term approach over 15 years now coming even more than that is really important
because so much research is depends on what's happening if there's a famine or a drought or,
you know, a inflation at a particular time, that really skews the results.
And there is this cumulative effect and the life cycle and intergenerational and the
fact that we've been working for so long means that we have a place at the table.
We build up relationships, we get no. And it adds an element of sustainability that goes away from the problem of short term donor cycles.
So with UNICEF, we were able to get some additional funding, but only for one year and then at the end of that, yet again, we can try.
And this longer term funding that we've been able to secure has actually meant that we've been able
to do things in a much better organised and more sustainable and thought through cumulative way.
And, of course, the. This luxury of being able to do a longer term observational research that isn't
constrained by the dictates of a more evaluative and experimental modular approach,
which is now the order of the day, means that we can look much broader, broader issues,
less at predetermined outcomes and come up with new things that we hadn't predicted, such as the catch up growth from malnutrition.
Whereas the sort of tendency now for the large scale research is very much focussing on the assumption
that our cities are the gold standard and that one has to look just very narrowly at impact.
And this tends to ignore the actual reality of how social change occurs and wider issues of how policy does actually change.
So one way that young lives got round, this problem was to do additional focussed studies and Ethiopia.
You can see the list on health care financing on food security and safety nets, one on orphaned,
vulnerable children and urban relocation, one on child work, child marriage, early learning, violence and so forth.
No impact, Ology, I just came up with that term last night, I haven't even Googled if it exists.
The pressure to to make false promises in applications is just terrible.
It really we we we are there.
If we want to get a grant, we have to claim that we're going to reach large numbers, be able to change policies and it's just not true.
And then the log frames on reporting on that are really tyrannical because it makes forcing us to just do things in a very stereotypical way,
which takes out a lot of the potential for innovation in research.
And and I must say that one of the fantastic things about the collaboration with Oxford has been the way in which we are.
Oxford gave the countries the ability to follow our noses as as they say and take things in directions that we thought were important.
And if we had a convincing rationale, lots of new things happened in Ethiopia.
We felt that a relocation study was really important eight years down the road.
It is going to provide some genuine new, innovative research wasn't done in the other countries.
But Joe and Graham were convinced, and they found the funding for us to do it.
And even though the four countries have been doing the same research,
the way we have done it and gone about it is often quite different and is context specific and country specific.
So Rand Nguyen Santiago talked about their advisory boards in Ethiopia.
The advisory board wasn't working very well, and we replaced it with a child research and practise forum, which I'll talk about.
The theory theory of change is straitjacket. It's become the norm that you have to have theories of change.
If you look at the theories of change that we did four or five years ago,
that crap, that useless because things move on because realities are different.
And so, you know, I don't think that they are in.
It's a useful mechanism to start thinking, but they are in boxes that that just don't can't understand,
can't give you a real sense of how things actually do change because they are far too mechanistic.
And policy change is really non-linear, and we can talk about this in the discussion, but I think it's a way it needs.
It's something where there is an argument for change that build up to a tipping point with cumulative messages that
various studies show and that it is also the more influential donors and projects often have much more ability.
And so it's a question of working together and working behind the scenes and working
with people and using Santiago showed how the policy briefs you go on the website,
you'll see 86 policy briefs, the social media and so forth.
Now, working with government, Santiago had a slide there that he didn't end up talking about at the end about how
working with government does actually constrain what you can do with the media.
And that's very much the case also in Ethiopia. And we do work with particular ministries, Ministry of Education, Labour and Social Affairs, women,
children and youth where the Child Research and Practise Forum is housed actually in the ministry.
And they asked us for gender norms. Training ground was also mentioned many other cases in India of training and capacity building.
Santiago mentioned there was the London Summit on Child Marriage and FGM c young lives was us to participate in the planning of that and so forth.
And also in cross-sectoral areas. But there is the politics of the said and the unsayable and the things that you can say in public and the
things that you say behind closed doors and the importance of being able to acknowledge important things.
But and changes.
And that's one of the beauties of a long scale research that does is able to show how tremendously our countries have changed over the past 15 years.
The lives of children have changed. That has to be acknowledged.
And then having acknowledged all the positive things, we can be really critical and openly critical.
And the government in Ethiopia that is often very suspicious of research is willing to accept criticism
from young lives because they know that the broad story of change is really impressive and quite amazing.
And then when we say, Well, this isn't working, the pace of the early marriage change is not fast enough.
Divorced women are facing problems. Violence affecting girls.
We can really enter a dialogue because there is a recognition.
Yeah, OK, so I'm running out of time. Here's an example from work we did with the Ministry of Education, and I won't go into it.
But just to say that it was very much a responsive thing where we started off with a review, had consultations in the regions, we had a task force.
We we worked with the Education Task Force.
This was a self funded study. And then we went in to look at the question of the supply side and the demand side,
and it was kind of very much working in close collaboration with the Ministry of Education.
I'm emphasise that it's really important for others to take on our message as part of the problem with the way that
the donors and funders operate is they want to segregate the impact of what they do from the rest of what happens.
And actually, it's much more important that say, in this case,
UNICEF picks up on something that we says or does a joint brief then that we produce two extra briefs.
And so we've produced now five briefs.
We've jointly with UNICEF that have funded this thing and the last one and end with this the child research and Practise Forum.
So this is a forum with 600 people that are on the mailing list and we meet every month on the last Thursday of the month.
And anybody can present so it's not young lives. It's organised jointly with the Ministry of Women and UNICEF.
But we encourage all kinds of people to present there,
and it gives an opportunity with the newsletters and the annual summaries to really create a context for discussion,
presentations and meeting behind the scenes in a context which is very fractured between opposition.
At the time, the The Child Research and Practise Forum was was established 10 years ago.
There was really quite a lot of tensions between government, the NGOs, the donors, and this was a forum that brought us all together.
And so I think it's been quite a useful attempt to get people together.
Last slide. So the continued involvement over a long period has been key to the ways in which we are policy engagement has been effective.
A short period, we wouldn't have been able to do anything like this.
The way that we've been able to be flexible and establish trust has also been extremely important.
The working capacity building working together with key ministries, the Child Research and Practise Forum,
a new centre of Child Ethiopian Centre for Child Research established with UNICEF that is a legacy of young lives, is also very important.
And then the networks and the forums that provide evidence for debate that help that process of the cumulative conceptual change.
And I think that that's really what I'd like to to stress the bridging of the
divides and that we really need to change our way about thinking of impact.
It's not that you do one little piece of research and then you get a policy change.
It's actually working with others to begin to change the climate cumulatively till you reach a tipping point.