Sixty-nine million children, or more than one in five, live in poverty in the forty richest countries in the world, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a report.
This comes despite a decline in child poverty rates between 2012 and 2014 and between 2019 and 2021 by about 8 percent in the 40 European Union and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, reports Al-Rai daily.
UNICEF Innocenti, the research department of the United Nations agency, said that this is equivalent to about six million children out of a total number of children of 291 million.”
But at the end of 2021, more than 69 million children were living in poverty in those countries.
“For most children, this means they may grow up without enough nutritious food, clothing, school supplies or a warm place which they can call home,” said Beau Victor of UNICEF Innocenti.
The UNICEF figure is based on relative poverty, which constitutes about 60 percent of average national income, and which is often used in developed countries to determine their poverty levels.
