Despite showing advances in childhood poverty rates, in the face of the covid-19 pandemic calamity, that has hit the country, in the last three years, the country has seen the illiteracy rate double among children.
The sad conclusion is part of the report 'Multidimensional Poverty in Childhood and Adolescence in Brazil, released this Tuesday (10) by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef).
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Although it shows that the percentage of people, up to 17 years old, ‘with some type of deprivation’ fell from 66.1% to 62.9% in 2019 and to 60.3%, in 2022, this level corresponds to 31.9 million children and adolescents, out of a total of 52.8 million, belonging to this range age. “A downward trend that we still think is very slow”, admits Unicef social policy specialist, Santiago Varella.
“Looking at multidimensional poverty, with the temporal perspective of 2022, is very relevant, because we begin to understand what the recovery from the post-pandemic period is meaning for the lives of children and adolescents”, he adds Varella.
Far beyond the apparent 'coldness' of the data, their analysis allows us to identify a pattern of regional and racial disparities, such as those presented by the North and Northeast, which has the worst rates of children and adolescents with some type of deprivation, in which no state was below 70%, which indicates the worst conditions of life.
The biggest negative highlights were the states of Pará, Amapá, Maranhão and Piauí, all above 90%. Conversely, the South and Southeast regions had the best rates, with emphasis on São Paulo, with the best national rate, at 37%, followed by the Federal District, with 37.6%.
As a way of measuring the level of multidimensional poverty, Unicef takes into account children and adolescents' access to six basic rights: income, education, information, water, sanitation and housing.
They are also considered, from situations of intermediate deprivation – when there are difficulties in exercising rights – to extreme, when there is no access. Such information is collected by Unicef, based on the Continuous Household Sample (Pnad Contínua), from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). “We start from the principle that children’s rights are a priority and everyone is equally important”, explains Varella.
Color is also another weight difference, due to the concept of multidimensional poverty, since, while 48.2% of white people had some deprivation, this percentage jumped to 68.8%, in the case of black people, a difference of 20.6 percentage points (p.p.) in 2022, which was 22.1 p.p. in 2019.
