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Poverty research and assessment have attracted considerable international attention and resources over the last decade, as exemplified by international initiatives such as the UN Millennium Development Goals. Notwithstanding a growing body of research, however, there is still much to be done to effectively disseminate research results and strengthen relationships between NGOs, research networks, and policy practitioners to ensure substantial policy change. This paper explores efforts to bridge multi-disciplinary research, policy engagement, and practice to improve poor children's life quality in four diverse countries. It draws on Young Lives research and experiences in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam to identify factors that either contributed to or thwarted evidence-based pro-poor child-focused change. It focuses in particular on three key aspects: partnership and networking, framing of messages, and dissemination/communication methodologies. The paper concludes by reflecting on the particular challenges involved when promoting children's rights, including children's limited voice in the social and political arena, the dearth of state and civil society champions of children's rights, a limited evidence base to establish macro-micro policy linkages, and the tendency for children's issues to be limited to health and education policies.

Largely ignored as an anomaly, the 1892 general election represents a major gap in the scholarship on late nineteenth-century British politics. This article is the first to analyse the issues on and electioneering rhetoric with which it was fought, with a focus on England's constituencies. It argues that the early 1890s saw the inauguration of a new, 'positive' kind of political appeal. It explores how Liberals embraced the radical reforms of the National Liberal Federation's 'Newcastle programme' and how Unionists constructed a self-referential 'positive Unionism' that trumpeted their achievements in government. In addition, by considering the limits of Home Rule as an electoral strategy, the article challenges accepted narratives of Liberalism's slide into 'faddism' and Unionist dominance. The article draws on my databases of election addresses. Addresses were an essential medium for the communication of political appeals; by analysing their content, the article highlights the utility of quantitative methodologies for studying shifts in and the transmission of political discourses.

This paper emphasises that malnutrition cannot be tackled without understanding its causes. Child malnutrition remains a major public health problem in Ethiopia, yet the government has no specific nutrition policy. Levels of wasting (acute malnutrition) and stunting (chronic malnutrition) in children aged 6 to 59 months are among the world's highest. As long as so many children remain malnourished, Ethiopia will not achieve the first Millennium Development Goal – eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. Drawing on a sample of 1,999 one-year-olds across 20 sites, Young Lives has sought to better understand the child, household, community and policy level determinants of malnutrition and the ways in which they differ across different regions of Ethiopia. The paper quantifies the impact of poverty, health-care and caring practices, and challenges the World Bank belief that investment in growth monitoring to promote change in caregivers' behaviour will, by itself, significantly improve nutritional status. Coverage of health services may have expanded, but limited and costly services discourage users. Quality services are lacking. Respondents complained about inadequate equipment, poorly trained and/or insensitive medical staff, and expensive medication. The key findings of this paper are grouped under three headings: child, family/household, and community characteristics. Policy implications are discussed with reference to UNICEF's three-part conceptual framework on child malnutrition. The paper suggests that tackling child malnutrition requires training programmes for nutritionists; sensitivity training for health professionals; availability of essential quality drugs and health personnel who know how to administer these appropriately; health fee waiver systems for poor households; and the inclusion of specific nutritional indicators in the new Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper.

Population behavior, like voting and vaccination, depends on the structure of social networks. This structure can differ depending on behavior type and is typically hidden. However, we do often have behavioral data, albeit only snapshots taken at one time point. We present a method jointly inferring a model for both network structure and human behavior using only snapshot population-level behavioral data. This exploits the simplicity of a few parameter model, geometric sociodemographic network model, and a spin-based model of behavior. We illustrate, for the European Union referendum and two London mayoral elections, how the model offers both prediction and the interpretation of the homophilic inclinations of the population. Beyond extracting behavior-specific network structure from behavioral datasets, our approach yields a framework linking inequalities and social preferences to behavioral outcomes. We illustrate potential network-sensitive policies: How changes to income inequality, social temperature, and homophilic preferences might have reduced polarization in a recent election.

Ethiopia has one of the lowest primary school enrolment rates and one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world. In 2002 Ethiopia's adult literacy rate was 41.5 per cent and its gross primary enrolment rate was 66 per cent, significantly worse than the average for low income countries of 63.9 per cent and 98.6 per cent respectively. Government efforts have focused on expanding access to primary education, particularly in rural areas, but as a consequence, insufficient resources have been allocated to improving the quality of education. Recent education reforms have resulted in progress towards access-related targets: the net rate of primary school enrolment increased from 35 per cent in 1997-1998 to approximately 57.4 per cent in 2003-2004. The Ministry of Education itself acknowledges that the need to allocate resources to expand coverage has diverted resources away from investment in quality-related improvements – teacher to student ratio, curricula reform, textbook to student ratio1– so the quality of schooling is likely to decrease. Completion rates in primary school remain much lower than enrolment rates.