​The past two decades have seen a growing focus on both poverty reduction and promoting children’s rights. In children’s rights, the right to protection from exploitation, abuse and violence has often been a ‘Cinderella’ area; it is considered to affect relatively few children, and as a specialist area of social welfare outside the remit of ‘mainstream’ anti-poverty activities. In recent years, the recognition that economic deprivation underlies some (but by no means all) violations of children’s protection rights has meant some child protection programmes have started to include anti-poverty components.

This paper is part of a broader research and networking programme that aims to strengthen linkages between action on poverty, development and child protection. It reports on an adapted systematic review that examines the contribution of anti-poverty programmes to child protection interventions in four areas – child marriage, sexual violence, physical violence and inadequate care – in low- and middle-income countries. The review focuses on two questions:

·         To what extent do child protection interventions (in our four focal areas) have an anti-poverty focus?·       What contribution do anti-poverty components make in improving the quality of child protection interventions?

While the review is grounded in a broad conceptualisation of poverty as multidimensional, our operational definition of anti-poverty programmes was those that aimed to strengthen individuals’ or household’s economic security – their income, consumption or assets.

Rachel Marcus, Ella Page