Children are more than twice as likely as adults to live in extreme poverty, with nearly 385 million children worldwide experiencing that condition, according to a new analysis from the World Bank Group and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The report, titled Ending Extreme Poverty: A Focus on Children, finds that in 2013, 19.5 per cent of children in developing countries were living in households that survived on an average of $1.90 a day or less per person, compared to just 9.2 per cent of adults.
Globally, almost 385 million children were living in extreme poverty.
The youngest children are the most at risk – with more than one-fifth of children under the age of five in the developing world living in extremely poor households.
The new analysis came on the heels of the release of the World Bank Group’s new flagship study, Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016: Taking on Inequality, which found that some 767 million people globally were living on less than $1.90 per day in 2013, half of them under the age of 18.
The global estimate of extreme child poverty is based on data from 89 countries, representing 83 per cent of the developing world’s population.
Sub-Saharan Africa has both the highest rates of children living in extreme poverty at just under 50 per cent, and the largest share of the world’s extremely poor children, at just over 50 per cent.
South Asia has the second highest share at nearly 36 per cent – with over 30 per cent of extremely poor children living in India alone. More than four out of five children in extreme poverty live in rural areas.
UNICEF and the World Bank are calling on governments to:
-Routinely measure child poverty at the national and subnational level and focus on children in national poverty reduction plans as part of efforts to end extreme poverty by 2030;
-Strengthen child-sensitive social protection systems, including cash transfer programs that directly help poor families to pay for food, health care, education and other services that protect children from the impact of poverty and improve their chances of breaking the cycle in their own lives;
-Prioritize investments in education, health, clean water, sanitation and infrastructure that benefit the poorest children, as well as those that help prevent people from falling back into poverty after setbacks like droughts, disease or economic instability; and
-Shape policy decisions so that economic growth benefits the poorest children.