Unmasking the Silent Crisis: How Socioeconomic and Cultural Forces Perpetuate Multidimensional Child Poverty in Tanzania
Abstract
This paper systematically reviews the literature on multidimensional child poverty to provide insight into the socio-economic and cultural factors behind it in Tanzania. Recognising the pressing need to understand child-specific deprivations, the study has employed a structured methodology based on the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method. The review process aimed to search for terms using the Population, Interventions, Comparison and Outcome (PICO) framework, which included keywords such as “child poverty”, “multidimensional child poverty”, “child deprivation”, and “multidimensional child deprivation”. The paper sourced data from two high-impact databases, Web of Science and Scopus. To ensure rigour in the selection, we followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework, narrowing down an initial set of 427 publications to 238 by applying filters on duplicates, relevance, and publication date to reduce this number to only 238. These were supplemented with 16 reports from the United Republic of Tanzania, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank to ensure a comprehensive view of the subject. Using thematic analysis, this review summarised household composition, traditional gender roles, parental education, household income inequalities, and rural-urban differences as the main factors affecting multidimensional child poverty from the selected studies. These findings highlight the diverse determinants of multidimensional child poverty in Tanzania, identifying a necessity for tailored intervention integrating socio-economic and cultural factors to address this persistent issue.
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References
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