Well over half of Brazilian children and adolescents — some 32 million — live in poverty, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics compiled by Unicef and released on Tuesday.
While 63 percent of young Brazilians live in poverty overall, this figure rises to 72.5 percent among Black and Indigenous children and adolescents. Among white and Asian Brazilian children, the figure falls to 49 percent. Most of those suffering from poverty live in states in the North and Northeast of the country.
The Unicef report considers poverty in all its dimensions, including child labor, income, and access to a home, sanitation, information, and education. Data from the latter criteria is the most recent, dating from 2022. The proportion of children deprived of the right to literacy doubled last year compared with 2020, from 1.9 to 3.8 percent.
Last December, The Brazilian Report showed that the worsening of socioeconomic indicators during the covid pandemic led many children to leave school to work on the streets.
The Unicef data shows that poverty indicators among young Brazilians have worsened across the board in recent years.
In 2021, 16 percent of young people aged 17 and under lived in households classified as in extreme poverty — living on less than USD 1.90 a day. This is the highest rate of extreme youth poverty in the last five years.
The number of young people deprived of access to adequate food rose from 9.8 million in 2020 to 13.7 million the following year — an increase of almost 40 percent.
Access to basic sanitation and insufficient income are two of the biggest poverty-related issues affecting young Brazilians, with 21.2 million girls and boys deprived of the former, and 20.6 million living in households with an insufficient income to guarantee a comfortable life.
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