Over 37% of the worlds’ children live in poverty (UNICEF Data Center, 2017). However, their distribution across countries and regions are far from equal. This study utilizes the Children’s Worlds dataset in order to provide insights into resolving child poverty issues in diverse international contexts by applying children’s rights approach. This dissertation proposes that the implementation of the UNCRC (“children’s rights”) can serve as a key factor in achieving child well-being and addressing the issue of child poverty. In order to explore the role of children’s rights in this relationship, the material deprivation gap is explored and a new scale to measure children’s rights implementation is proposed. Therefore, three studies were conducted to achieve these goals. The first study focuses on a pattern analysis of the material deprivation among children living in five regions of the world. This paper employs latent class analysis for the identification of the patterns and multinomial regression in the exploration of the factors impacting class membership. The findings suggest that a material deprivation gap exists among world regions and has regional patterns embedded in socio-cultural context. This manuscript is designed to inform anti-poverty policy development based on the children’s subjective experiences of poverty in line with the children’s rights approach. The second manuscript is devoted to scale development that allows for measuring the outcomes of children’s rights implementation based on the standards of the UNCRC. The exploratory and confirmatory analysis were used in order to provide evidence of the strong factorial structure of the scale. As a result, a scale for measuring Provision and Participation has been proposed. The implications for the scale utilization in international research, practice, and policy are discussed in the chapter. The third paper is an offshoot pilot study of the previous manuscript. This study utilizes the Provision and Participation Rights Scale developed in the second manuscript in order to elicit the role of children’s rights implementation in the relationship between material deprivation and child subjective well-being in Ethiopia, Norway, and the UK. This study employs mediation path analysis based on SEM technique. This manuscript provides implications for international social work and development practice and discusses the role of context in shaping the mediation relationship and the effect of children’s rights implementation.
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