World Bank: about 8 million Zimbabweans live in extreme poverty

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The number of Zimbabweans living in extreme poverty has reached 7.9 million after the outbreak of the Corona epidemic, and the closures caused by it caused another economic shock to the country.

The British newspaper The Guardian quoted a World Bank report saying that about half of Zimbabwe's population fell into extreme poverty between 2011 and 2020, with children bearing the brunt of the misery.

According to the report, the number of people living in extreme poverty is expected to remain at 7.9 million in 2021 amid persistently high prices and a slow recovery of jobs and wages in the formal and informal sectors.

Given the limitations of social safety nets to protect large numbers of the poor, families are more likely to turn to negative coping strategies. For example, low-income families are more likely to forgo formal health care because they cannot pay for services and keep children out of school to avoid education costs, such as school fees, uniforms, and textbooks.

The epidemic added 1.3 million Zimbabweans to the extreme poor as people lost jobs and incomes were in urban areas.

According to the World Bank, the "extremely poor" is defined as people living below the food poverty line of $29.80 per month.

Those living below that limit doubled from three million in 2011 to 6.6 million in 2019, with numbers higher than ever before in rural areas.

Child poverty has risen dramatically across the country, and humanitarian agencies have reported high levels of malnutrition and stunted growth.

“Due to economic and climate shocks, poverty rose sharply, and extreme poverty reached 42 percent in 2019, up from 30 percent in 2017. Nearly 90 percent of the extremely poor live in rural areas, of whom 1.6 million are children,” the report said.

Higher fuel and food prices have affected the poor, with increases in maize and maize flour prices alone estimated to have increased extreme poverty by two percentage points between May and December 2019.

According to the survey, in July 2020, about 500,000 families had one person who had lost his job since the beginning of the pandemic, exacerbating the plight of the poor and pushing more families into intermittent or long-term suffering. The report said the most common cause of job losses in urban areas was business closures due to the pandemic.

While wages have fallen, 23 percent of the poorest people, employed before the coronavirus pandemic, lost their jobs by June 2020, adding thousands to the unemployment figures.

Among the non-poor, this figure was also as high as 20%. However, the report said that since only a few low-income people were employed before the pandemic, the proportion of families affected by job losses is about the same for both the poor and the non-poor.

The international report indicated that as Zimbabweans suffered from successive lockdowns, 1.4 million people lost basic foods.

The Guardian said that the negative reading of Zimbabwe's economic prospects comes when the government boasts a budget surplus of 9.8 billion of its local currency (equivalent to 19.5 million US dollars), stressing that the economy has grown under the leadership of President Emmerson Mnangagwa. Still, the reality On the streets of the capital, Harare, he tells something different, telling the story of the struggle for families to make a living.

Despite the uncertainty concerning the third wave of the COVID-19 outbreak, the World Bank saw that Zimbabwe could see an economic recovery in 2022 with a bumper harvest expected to ensure that most rural families have enough to eat lead the economy to a 3.9 percent growth percent.