UN considers measures against poverty insufficient

The UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Olivier De Schutter, described on Friday as insufficient and “full of holes” the more than 1.400 social protection measures adopted by governments around the world to alleviate the increase in poverty during the crisis caused by Covid-19.

The UN senior representative, in an analysis of the implementation of such state policies published on Friday, noted:

I release my first annual report on the impact of COVID19 on people in poverty, scrutinizing the recent wave of social protection. I find that most measures are maladapted, short-term, reactive, and inattentive to the realities of people in poverty

According to these data, “the governments have budgeted a total of about 589,000 million dollars for social protection in the current crisis, which represents around 0.4 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP),” although the The rapporteur predicts that these initiatives will not stop the increase in impoverishment.

The increase could reach 176 million new people, considering as the poverty threshold that which is below $ 3.2 a day.

According to De Schutter, poverty also affects many disadvantaged communities, which could be excluded from protection plans, due to details such as the fact that many programs ask beneficiaries to register through the internet, a medium to which many low-income families do not have access.

Another example expressed by De Shutter is that there are programs that pose “impossible conditions to meet” for people in precarious working conditions or without permanent residence, such as many migrant workers or those in the informal sector, which reach 61 percent of the global workforce.

Similarly, the United Nations official said that “the worst consequences of the crisis on poverty are yet to come,” while also regretting that many of the social protection programs are already being phased out or may not. be renewed if the political sign of the governments changes in future elections.

In the coming weeks, the annual high-level session of the UN General Assembly should begin online, whose fundamental theme will be the confrontation with the Covid-19 pandemic.