Child poverty crisis

The number of children without critical social protection is increasing globally in staggering numbers, almost doubling in four years, a joint United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and International Labour Organization (ILO) report has found.

Across the world, there are 2.4 billion children who all need adequate social protection, but 1.77 billion lack access to a child or family cash benefit, which is a fundamental pillar of a social protection system – a serious concern, local advocates believe, that demands urgent action.

Released last week, the 136-page report, More Than a Billion Reasons: The Urgent Need to Build Universal Social Protection for Children, emphasised that the evidence that social protection has immediate and profound impacts on children’s lives and futures is beyond question.

“For national policymakers who face difficult decisions, competing demands and constrained financing, we hope the evidence included in this report makes a compelling case for prioritizing social protection for children and families – demonstrating both immediate and longer-term returns,” a section of the report read.

ILO defines social protection as “a set of policies and programmes designed to reduce and prevent poverty and vulnerability during our lives”.

The first UNICEF-ILO joint report, published in 2019, outlined that 689 million children were living in multidimensionally poor households, compared to one billion in the 2023 report.

Similarly, some 385 million children were living in extreme poverty in 2019, that is, on less than US$1.90 a day. But, four years later, that figure has ballooned to 800 million, with children subsisting below a poverty line of US$3.20 daily.

JAMAICA DESPERATELY NEEDS A MINISTRY OF FAMILY AFFAIRS

Child advocate and founder of Hear The Children’s Cry, Betty Ann Blaine, told The Sunday Gleaner that child poverty has long been a concern in Jamaica, with the poorest children residing in rural areas.

In 2002, the government introduced the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH), a conditional cash transfer programme targeting vulnerable households within the population.

As Jamaica’s flagship social assistance programme, PATH currently provides cash grants to approximately 350,000 beneficiaries.

Up to 2018, at least 25 per cent of Jamaican children were living below the poverty line.

“Most of the children who run away from their homes are children that are in need – materially, emotionally and in other aspects – because a happy child never leaves home. We visit a lot of these homes and, when you look at the material neglect and their physical space, you are not surprised that they leave home,” Blaine said.

She further reasoned that almost all the children who were killed under violent and tragic circumstances, and whose names have been inscribed on the Secret Gardens Monument in downtown Kingston, are children of the poor and working classes.

“Children who die in fires and children who are murdered, for the most part, are children of the poor and working classes. A lot of the single mothers are not gainfully employed or permanently employed and, when they go out to hustle, their children are left at home and are extremely vulnerable,” she lamented.

Blaine hopes that the UNICEF-ILO report will stir the Government to examine and address child poverty, as it drives a lot of the social problems the country has with children.

“What it is going to take is the political will, which we have never been able to muster, to change this. It can be fixed,” she said, adding that Jamaica desperately needs a ministry of family affairs, as poor children come from multidimensionally poor households.

Blaine also called for a children’s audit to assess the state of Jamaican children, home by home, in order to implement appropriate solutions.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE

Among the six recommendations made by UNICEF-ILO is for countries to accelerate progress towards universal social protection coverage for children, as a critical step towards improving their well-being, and ensure that social protection systems are adapted to developments in the world of work to enhance economic security for parents, caregivers and their families.

“Without this urgent action, we are choosing a path that limits the potential of this generation of children, with sobering implications for our collective future,” the UNICEF-ILO report warned.

The Caribbean Policy Research Institute’s (CAPRI) 2021 report, Come Mek Wi Hol’ Yuh Han’: The Components of an Effective Social Safety Net for Jamaica, examined existing programmes and made recommendations for a system that promotes economic inclusiveness.

CAPRI underscored that the absence of overarching legislation for social protection has been blamed for an uncoordinated approach to poverty reduction.

“The PATH programme targets the most vulnerable groups, but suffers from targeting errors of inclusion and exclusion, and the conditionalities hurt more than they help. By removing or reducing conditionalities, better targeting, and expanded coverage, PATH can better contribute to breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty,” the CAPRI report read in part.

A POPULATION THAT IS TAKEN CARE OF PAYS GREAT DIVIDENDS

Senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Dr Orville Taylor, said the PATH programme is not funded as well as it ought to be and the Government has also failed to conduct tracer studies to ascertain what has happened to the children who have benefited.

“Social protection on the whole has traditionally been misconceived and, even with the robustness of PATH, there is still not that overall recognition that PATH is an investment as opposed to welfare. A population that is taken care of, in terms of access to good schooling, healthcare, et cetera, without too much burden, is a population that is highly productive and is a population that pays great dividends in terms of economic growth,” he explained to The Sunday Gleaner.

Taylor added that spending more money on PATH is a great way to go, as well as increased spend on free education and school feeding programmes.

“In the long term, the government will end up spending less money on crime and, in the medium term, we will generate the necessary amount of economic growth that will fuel the recovery of the investment,” he reasoned.

Meanwhile, Dr Peter-John Gordon, lecturer in the Department of Economics at UWI, Mona, said, to a great extent, social protection in Jamaica relies heavily on the resources of the family.

PATH IS INADEQUATE

“While PATH helps, it is certainly inadequate, but the ability to increase the benefit and sustain it is a function of how wealthy the society is and how much tax revenue the Government can raise to pay for these social services. Whether or not we can afford more really comes down to what we would be willing to give up to be able to afford higher benefits,” Gordon told The Sunday Gleaner.

“For the PATH programme, to what extent are we capturing everybody who would normally be qualified? Are there people who are not receiving the benefit?” Gordon questioned.

The UNICEF-ILO report explained that the global response to the devastating impacts of COVID-19 has shown how powerful social protection can be, as more than 200 countries and territories either introduced new programmes or rapidly adapted existing schemes.

“Unfortunately, most of these programmes have been short-lived, ebbing as the worst of the pandemic passed. But, as they have ebbed, the needs of children and families have continued to grow. Today, the economic impacts of COVID-19 are ongoing and the cost-of-living crisis is unfolding,” a section of the report read.

Gordon, an economist, noted that the rate of inflation is not as high as it was before but, as prices rise, the poor and those who rely on labour income are squeezed.

judana.murphy@gleanerjm.com

FINDINGS OF THE 2023 UNICEF-ILO JOINT REPORT

• Although there are proven pathways to expanding social protection for children towards universal coverage, investment remains insufficient.

• Approximately 1.5 billion children below the age of 15 years currently have no access to social protection and, alarmingly, progress in increasing effective coverage globally has stalled since 2016.

• Significant and troubling regional disparities exist in effective coverage for children, and, in some regions, progress has stalled or there has been a decline in coverage since 2016. The most pronounced decline occurred in the Americas, where coverage fell by 6.4 percentage points from 63.8 to 57.4 per cent.

• The challenges children face are growing and compounded as a result of ongoing impacts of COVID-19, the cost-of-living crisis, increased fragility, conflict and displacement and the unfolding effects of the climate emergency.

• Enhancing the shock-responsiveness of social protection systems is crucial to upholding the rights of children and halting the acceleration in child poverty triggered by crises.

• Girls and women have been disproportionately impacted by multiple crises. They also experience higher poverty rates than boys and men, and face multiple systematic barriers that impede gender equality.

• Children with disabilities or living in a household with a family member with a disability are more vulnerable to poverty and face financial barriers to a full life, but are less likely to receive adequate social protection.