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Women and children compose the overwhelming majority of the people of the world in poverty across the globe. Suffer the LittleChildren: National and International Dimensions of Child Poverty and Public Policy, examines the burden of poverty on children, and the implications of that poverty upon the lives and future mobility of generations of children. One of the best aspects of this body of work is that it places the problem of child poverty in international context. In essence, the universality of child poverty is illuminated as well as the relationship between women's status and child poverty and, the greater likelihood that children of color, in particular, across the globe will live in poverty.

As the 21st century begins, the overwhelming majority of the people in the world who live in poverty are women and children. Humanity has seen stunning advances and has made enormous strides for children, many of them in the last decade, many others in just over the span of a generation. Children's lives have been saved and their suffering prevented (UNICEF, 2000). For example, polio, once a global epidemic, is on the verge of eradication in some countries, and deaths from two remorseless child killers, measles and neonatal tetanus, have been reduced over the past 10 years by 85% and more than 25%, respectively. Some 12 million children are now free from the risk of mental retardation due to iodine deficiency. Blindness from vitamin A deficiency has been significantly reduced. More children are in school today than at any previous time.

Concern with the size of poverty in any nation leads to a broader question: What does it mean to be poor in a rich society? More specifically, what does it mean for a family, and particularly its children, to live in a state of poverty within a prosperous society? To begin to answer these questions, we must look at poverty in the context of its opposite, plenty. As members of modern societies, we use a wide range of goods and services to effect our participation in social relations and to create and sustain our sense of social identity. The mainstream standard of living defines the average American's family resources that fall sufficiently short of the mainstream as deprivation, precarious subsistence, exclusion – in short, poverty. Our common cultural understanding is that we cannot play our social roles or participate meaningfully in our communities without the basic material resources necessary to carry out our activities. One way or another, each of us has to “make a living” in order to “have a life.” The roles and activities that define participation are age-graded – child, teenager, young adult, mature adult, senior citizen. For any one age, these common cultural understandings allow people to pass judgment on their own rank and that of others in a continuum from destitution to unseemly affluence, based on what kind of participation they can effect.

Approximately 120 million children under the age of 14 labor full time, according to recent estimates by the International Labor Organization (ILO) (U.S. Department of Labor, 2002, 2001; UNICEF, 2000). If those for whom work is a secondary activity are included, the number of working children rises to 250 million. The majority of child laborers live in Asia, although Africa has a higher rate of child labor. The ILO estimates that 40% of African children between the ages of five and fourteen years of age, work. (U.S. Department of Labor, 2002, 2001) Although the majority of the 120 million full time working children labor in the commercial agricultural sector, child labor is not confined to any particular economic sector. Children work as domestic servants, in mining, as divers in deep-sea fishing, in construction, as prostitutes, in toy, shoe and garment factories, as cigarette makers, as rug weavers, in charcoal making, in glass and ceramics factories, as sports equipment and surgical instrument makers, in the match and fireworks industries and in many other jobs.

After Jomtien¹ under the goal of providing “education for all” a great number of countries made a strong commitment to extend the benefits of education to the poorest sectors of their population. Efforts have been made in the following years to fulfill this promise. But the issues associated with understanding and addressing disadvantaged populations are multiple and complex. Moreover the strategies followed by a number of countries have been framed under structural assumptions inherently limiting and undermining the intentions of the policies that gave them origin. Seeking to understand the challenges and complexities of change in these contexts, I analyze Mexico's assumptions framing educational policy toward the rural and indigenous poor.² I argue that a number of initiatives may fail to fully address the needs of these populations due to the assumptions underlying these policies which end up resting agency to the poor, their children, and to their teachers and schools. After describing the theoretical framework used in this chapter and providing a brief description of Mexico's political economy, I examine Mexico's past and current government policies toward the poor and look at the spaces that have opened up for innovation due to growing relationships with the global economy and the global community and to relationships between Mexico's central and local governments. I suggest that compulsory early childhood education is one obvious avenue (complementing policies such as Federalizacion and teacher education) to correct centuries of injustice and neglect. I discuss the implications of this analysis within the context of the current decentralization movement and the growing discontent among the rural poor.

Over the past decade, and coinciding with the rise in HIV/AIDS incidence, there has been a spectacular increase in the number of orphans in Malawi. Few orphans eat as many as two poor meals a day; most have few clothes, no shoes, bedding or soap. Hungry, poorly clothed children do not go to school or if they go, do not stay. Without completing at least primary school, job prospects are low. Without education or work orphans remain poor and become involve in casual sexual relationships. Orphans give birth to orphans. Those who are HIV positive give birth to those who are susceptible to HIV. Cycles of poverty, orphanhood and HIV/AIDS continue.

Located between 10 and 11 degrees north of the equator, and seven miles from the northeast corner of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago are a twin island republic and the southernmost islands in the Caribbean chain that begins off the coast of Florida. The islands have a tropical maritime climate with two seasons – a hot dry season from January to May and a hot rainy season from June to December. The daily temperature ranges from the low 70s to the high 80s year round, and for the 10-year period 1987–1996, Trinidad's mean low and high temperatures were 73 and 89 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. As the islands are located south of the hurricane belt, neither has been hit by a hurricane since Hurricane Flora hit Tobago in 1963.