Young Lives is an innovative long-term international research project, investigating the changing nature of child poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. In India, the study will focus only on the state of Andhra Pradesh.

1. produce good quality long-term quantitative and qualitative data on the changing lives of children living in poverty.

2. develop a replicable methodology for monitoring child welfare over the long-term to trace linkages between key policy changes and child welfare. To ensure that information produced is used to inform policy and action for improving child wellbeing.

3. towards the realization of the above cited goals, the study will formulate policy for progress towards meeting the 2015 international Development Targets. The project team will strive to develop a low-cost methodology for use in other countries. The geographic location of different study centers will reflect a range of different problems and issues encountered in the developing countries.

The data collected will be based upon a broad understanding of child welfare, and will include information on child development in addition to conventional nutritional and education measures.

Reasonable distribution of poor and non-poor districts from the three regions, AP with good representation for rural and urban areas will be ensured. Hyderabad being metropolitan the sample would have the state's distinctive cultural features. Selection needs to achieve various proportions as near as possible with only twenty sentinel sites . The sampling design provides for coverage of 14 poor and 6 non-poor SSSs (i.e. mandals within which an SSS will be established) with 15 rural and 5 urban SSSs.