Poverty and How Covid-19 Made an Impact

 Next Generation Diplomacy

Poverty and How Covid-19 Made an Impact

By Will Concepcion

Poverty during 2021

Poverty, as defined by Mark Robert Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University, is “not having the money to purchase the basic necessities to maintain a minimally adequate life, such as food, shelter and clothing.” The impact of Covid has been immense as over 150 million more individuals are now in extreme poverty or living on less than $1.90 a day compared to pre-pandemic. 

How did Covid-19 Affect Poverty in the United States?

Before Covid-19 hit, until 2020 there existed a slight but gradual decline in the poverty rate in America; it hit an all-time low of 10.5% since the first poverty rates were published in 1959. However, the pandemic’s arrival in the United States changed everything, as it had vast socioeconomic impacts. When the pandemic first hit, the poverty rate rose from 10.5 percent to 12 percent due to the ailing economy and spike in unemployment rates. Keep in mind this is with the CARES act that was set in place to bring relief. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was a federal relief package that impacted the unemployment rate and poverty, as Priyanka Boghani, writing for frontline, notes, “Individuals who qualified received stimulus checks of $1,200; married couples received $2,400; and those with children received an additional $500 per child.”

Covid-19 also contributed towards a decrease in shared prosperity, which is defined as the growth in the income of the poorest 40 percent of a country’s population.  This value is expected to either stagnate or even contract over the 2019-2021 fiscal years due to slower growth in average incomes. Without government intervention, “the COVID-19 crisis may trigger cycles of higher income inequality, lower social mobility among the vulnerable, and lower resilience to future shocks,” according to the World Bank Organization. 

Poverty in Africa

On the other hand, in Africa, the impacts of Covid-19 on poverty are even more severe. In Africa, when COVID-19 hit, beyond effects on employment, education was also impacted. Regarding jobs, over ⅓ of workers lost their occupations, while most of the two-thirds that retained their position experienced an “income decrease between 11.5% and 15.6%.” In Kenya, close to 900,000 people lost their jobs, and nearly two million people were left in poverty due to the pandemic.

The effects were even more severe for the children in Africa. After all, these children lost their sole source of education for at least 100 days, sometimes even more. In addition to all of this, since only 17.8% of the population had access to the internet, online school was also a privilege many didn’t have access to. These effects are bound to hurt these children in the future significantly since the dearth of education will hurt familial income and only exacerbate issues of inequality. 

Overall, the effects and consequences of the pandemic on poverty all over the world are dire, and thus we might ask how these governments should and will react to alleviate the critical situations at hand.



SOURCES

Boghani, Priyanka. “How COVID Has Impacted Poverty in America.” FRONTLINE, 8 Dec. 2020, www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/covid-poverty-america/.

“How COVID-19 Has Impacted Work and Poverty in Africa.” ONE, 6 July 2021, www.one.org/international/blog/coronavirus-impact-work-poverty-africa/.

World Bank. “COVID-19 to Add as Many as 150 Million Extreme Poor by 2021.” World Bank, 7 Oct. 2020, www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/covid-19-to-add-as-many-as-150-million-extreme-poor-by-2021.

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