Changing lives in a changing world

Young Lives is an international research project into the causes and consequences of children’s poverty. We are following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam over 15 years. We have now known the children for ten years. Our older group have turned 16 or 17. Our younger group have just had their ninth birthdays. Our research follows all 12,000 children, collecting survey data about their lives, their families, their communities and their schools. We also collect in-depth views and perspectives by interviewing a smaller number of children in each country in detail. We speak to their families and people in their communities and we interview them in groups as well. This gives us insights and information which are hard to capture in a large survey questionnaire. The 24 stories in this book come from these in-depth interviews. This is the second book we have produced that gives us a more detailed glimpse into the reality of some of the children’s lives as they grow up. The first was called “Nothing is impossible for me”: Stories from Young Lives children.