2023-12-06 06:54:58
Unicef is concerned about the situation of children in rich countries, particularly in France. Despite an improvement in recent years, more than 69 million children live in poverty in the 40 richest countries, or more than one child in five.
Between the periods 2012-2014 and 2019-2021, the number of children living in poverty fell by around 8% in the approximately 40 European Union and OECD countries reviewed. This represents “around 6 million fewer” poor children out of 291 million children in total, indicates in a report published Tuesday evening Unicef Innocenti, the research arm of the UN agency. But “there were still more than 69 million children in poverty” at the end of 2021.
Risks to “physical and mental health”
“For most children, this means a risk of growing up lacking nutritious food, clothing, school supplies or a heated place to live,” commented Bo Viktor Nylund of UNICEF Innocenti, highlighting the risks to their “physical and mental health”. UNICEF bases itself mainly on “relative poverty”, which corresponds to 60% of the national median income, often used by developed countries to establish their poverty threshold.
The report emphasizes the need to put in place specific social protection tools to ensure the well-being of children and the “political will” of States in this area, emphasizing that getting children out of poverty is not not an automatic consequence of a country’s wealth.
The differences in trajectories between certain countries are also significant. Since 2012, the biggest setbacks have been recorded in some of the richest countries: United Kingdom (+19.6% of poor children, or half a million additional children in a country where the poverty rate of children exceeded 20% in 2021), Iceland (+11%) and France (+10.4%).
Poland’s good result
In the United States, the number of poor children has fallen by 6.7%, but more than one child in four still lives in relative poverty. And the poverty rate there was twice as high in 2019-2021 as in Denmark, a country with similar per capita income. The situation of children has also progressed the most in Poland (-37.6% of poor children), Slovenia (-31.4%), Latvia (-31%) and Lithuania (-30.6%). ).
Highlighting the link between child poverty and economic inequality, the report also highlights the greater risks of being poor for children from single-parent families or from minorities. In the United States, for example, 30% of African-American children and 29% of Native American children live below the national poverty line, compared to 10% of non-Hispanic white children. In the EU, a child with parents from a non-EU nationality is 2.4 times more likely to be poor than a child with European parents.
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