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This paper explores how research advisory groups can be a vehicle for youth activism. It draws on our experiences with young activists, aged 15–26 years, in India and Brazil, who were advisors on a research project focused on youth livelihoods in cities. These young people played a vital role in supporting youth researchers, identifying research themes and developing engagement and advocacy strategies. Through this paper, we explore how the Youth Expert Group advisory model evolved differently in each location and examine how these were shaped by the context, the 'adult' research team and the youth activists themselves. A critically reflexive response in intergenerational partnership is essential to support youth activists in research activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a crucial intervention because of its long‐term impact on child development. However, information concerning the effectiveness of the ECEC in developing countries like India is sparsely available. This empirical study drew upon primary data collected from India's eastern state, West Bengal and investigated whether attending preschool contributed to children's cognitive and social skill development. The study found that attending preschool did not provide dividends in the form of cognitive and social skill accumulation. Furthermore, attending private preschool was associated with socioemotional development but no cognitive development. Moreover, parents' education seems to be a strong predictor for child's development. Given the findings of this paper, preschools in India, both in the public and private sectors, would need considerable quality improvement to deliver developmentally appropriate ECEC to children. It is particularly relevant in the context of the new National Education Policy in India, which emphasises the need to provide universal access to high‐quality ECCE to all young children across the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing participation in family decision making is an integral part of adolescent development. This paper uses longitudinal data from four low and middle income countries—Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam—to assess the relationship between young people's involvement in schooling decision making and schooling outcomes. In the pooled sample, compared to young adults who indicate to have no say in educational choices at age 19, adolescents who make these decisions unilaterally or jointly with parents are on average 17%–23% more likely to drop out by age 22. The effects are, however, heterogenous across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing rates of school enrolment have changed childhoods in the global South, so that it is now the norm for children to attend at least some years of primary school. This paper explores the extent to which valuing of children as educational projects and outcomes may be displacing previous valuations of children as contributors to the domestic economy. The paper draws on qualitative interview data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of children growing up in four developing countries, using a case study approach to explore the experiences of four children in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. The paper suggests that children are balancing expectations for the future with responsibilities to their families in the present, and concludes that the over-valuing of formal qualifications and the under-valuing of forms of work such as agriculture risk being internalised by children, leaving those who do not succeed feeling they are 'a waste'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses ethnographic and qualitative interview data with Muslim child domestic workers, their families and employers to investigate the social ties between young workers and their employers. Our analysis shows that working-class families use children’s domestic work with middle-class families as part of a web of resources to protect them from economic shocks and to enable them to afford to meet the cost of social obligations. We show that in this particular context, a town in Uttar Pradesh in north India, hiring domestic workers locks employers into relations of social obligation with their employees and their families. We conclude that these webs of support are enabled precisely because the domestic workers are children and not adults; their status as children makes it possible for the labour contract to be mystified and reconfigured as a social relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a study of thirty‐one children who lost their parent(s) in the course of armed conflict in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India, and were put in various orphanages across the state. The qualitative research method was employed in order to examine and understand and the nature of problems faced by these children. It explores ways in which these children seek to come to terms with the reality, and highlights the importance and relevance of incorporating their views in programmes meant for their rehabilitation and reintegration into the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on in‐depth interviews with 24 middle‐class Indian child participants, this is the first exploratory qualitative study, in India, to demonstrate the ways in which children as reflexive social actors re‐negotiated everyday schedules, drew on classed resources at their disposal and made sense of the impact of the pandemic on their educational pathways and future aspirations. These narratives offer a unique lens on the politics of middle‐classness and its constitutive relation to constructions of normative childhoods in contemporary India. Study findings contribute to the sociology of Indian childhood and more generally help enrich our understanding of southern childhoods and the reproduction of inequalities in contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing rates of school enrolment have changed childhoods in the global South, so that it is now the norm for children to attend at least some years of primary school. This paper explores the extent to which valuing of children as educational projects and outcomes may be displacing previous valuations of children as contributors to the domestic economy. The paper draws on qualitative interview data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of children growing up in four developing countries, using a case study approach to explore the experiences of four children in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. The paper suggests that children are balancing expectations for the future with responsibilities to their families in the present, and concludes that the over-valuing of formal qualifications and the under-valuing of forms of work such as agriculture risk being internalised by children, leaving those who do not succeed feeling they are "a waste". (Contains 2 notes.)

Child labour in India has long been the focus of research, policy concern and intervention. This article presents an analysis of children’s involvement in agricultural work, particularly cottonseed production, drawing on evidence gathered for Young Lives in 2007 and 2008. In parts of Andhra Pradesh, children work in cotton fields for two or three months of the year, with marked gender and age differentiation. In the mid-1990s, there was reportedly a cultural as well as an economic basis for children’s work in cottonseed pollination, when it was believed that pre-pubescent girls were preferred, as they were considered ‘pure’. However, the reasons for preferring children are now largely financial and practical. The article focuses on accounts from two girls who highlighted the importance of this form of work in their everyday lives and its consequences for their schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how children perceive social boundaries in rural Pakistan. It discusses that children develop and navigate their social relationships through their perception of social boundaries, which are shaped by kinship and sociospatial organisation in rural areas. Children's perception of social boundaries is also mediated through the intersectionality of their age and social group affiliation. An ethnographic case study of a village in Southern Punjab, Pakistan, is presented here. It uses a quantifiable photo‐elicitation technique and social mapping to analyse children's everyday mobilities and intersectionality in the cultural context of rural Pakistan to illustrate their perception of social boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many girls involved in sex work in Asia do so because they are compelled by economic circumstances and social inequality. Some enter sex work voluntarily, others do so by force or deception, sometimes involving migration across international borders. Nepalese girls involved in sex work via trafficking are the focus of this article, which aims at increasing our understanding of the context of sex trafficking, the methods and means of trafficking, living conditions in brothels and survival strategies among trafficked girls. Girls trafficked from Nepal to India are typically unmarried, illiterate and very young. Key routes to sex trafficking include employment-induced migration to urban areas, deception (through false marriage or visits) and abduction. Past initiatives towards their needs have adopted a welfare approach; such initiatives alone are inadequate as they ignore the importance of empowerment of women in the migration process and skill development in community re-integration. Anti-trafficking interventions need to be considered at (i) community level before movement begins; (ii) urban centres which are both source and transitory centres for trafficking; (iii) trafficking level when girls are highly mobile and in brothels; and (iv) return from trafficking as girls to move back into the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses ethnographic and qualitative interview data with Muslim child domestic workers, their families and employers to investigate the social ties between young workers and their employers. Our analysis shows that working-class families use children's domestic work with middle-class families as part of a web of resources to protect them from economic shocks and to enable them to afford to meet the cost of social obligations. We show that in this particular context, a town in Uttar Pradesh in north India, hiring domestic workers locks employers into relations of social obligation with their employees and their families. We conclude that these webs of support are enabled precisely because the domestic workers are children and not adults; their status as children makes it possible for the labour contract to be mystified and reconfigured as a social relationship.