An estimated one in six children or 356 million globally were living in extreme poverty before the COVID-19 pandemic began, and this is set to worsen significantly, according to a new World Bank Group and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) analysis.
The study, titled Global Estimate of Children in Monetary Poverty: An Update, was published recently by the World Bank Group and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). It consists of surveys from 149 countries and states that the condition of underserved children is set to worsen after the pandemic. It states that sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia consisted of 84 per cent of the world’s extremely poor children, out of which India and Nigeria accounted for the most. The number of children living in extreme poverty, however, had declined by approximately 29 million between 2013 and 2017.
“1 in 6 children living in extreme poverty is 1 in 6 children struggling to survive,” said Sanjay Wijesekera, UNICEF Director of Programmes. “These numbers alone should shock anyone. And the scale and depth of what we know about the financial hardships brought on by the pandemic are only set to make matters far worse. Governments urgently need a children’s recovery plan to prevent countless more children and their families from reaching levels of poverty unseen for many, many years.”
Although children make up around a third of the global population, around half of the extreme poor are children, according to the analysis. Children, defined as someone under the age of 18, were more than twice as likely to be extremely poor as adults in 2017, as the two respectively made up 17.5 per cent and 7.9 per cent of the extremely poor. The youngest children are the worst off – nearly 20 per cent of all children below the age of 5 in the developing world live in extremely poor households, according to estimates based on the Global Monitoring Database of household surveys from 149 countries compiled in spring 2020.
“The fact that one in six children were living in extreme poverty and that 50 per cent of the global extreme poor were children, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, is of grave concern to us all,” said Carolina S nchez-P ramo, Global Director of Poverty and Equity for the World Bank. “Extreme poverty deprives hundreds of millions of children of the opportunity to reach their potential, in terms of physical and cognitive development, and threatens their ability to get good jobs in adulthood.
The analysis also notes that more than 70 per cent of children in extreme poverty live in a household where the head of the house works in agriculture. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis will continue to disproportionately impact children, women and girls, threatening to reverse hard-won gains toward gender equality, said the World Bank and UNICEF in a joint press release.
