COVID-19 pandemic which has disrupted lives all over the world will significantly impact the women and push 47 million more women and girls into extreme poverty by 2021, according to the data released by the United Nations.
The analysis by the UN Women and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report mentioned that it would end in reversing decades of progress to lift this demographic above the poverty line.
It further stated that the COVID-19 outbreak will dramatically increase the poverty rate for women and consequently widen the gap between men and women who live in poverty.The poverty rate for women was expected to decrease by 2.7 per cent between 2019 and 2021, but projections now point to an increase of 9.1 per cent due to the pandemic and its fallout.’The pandemic will push 96 million people into extreme poverty by 2021, 47 million of whom are women and girls. This will increase the total number of women and girls living in extreme poverty to 435 million, with projections showing that this number will not revert to pre-pandemic levels until 2030,’ the UN agencies stated.By 2021, for every 100 men aged 25 to 34 living in extreme poverty (living on USD 1.90 a day or less), there will be 118 women, a gap that is expected to increase to 121 women per 100 men by 2030.’The increases in women’s extreme poverty are a stark indictment of deep flaws in the ways we have constructed our societies and economies,’ UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said.’We know that women take most of the responsibility for caring for the family; they earn less, save less and hold much less secure jobs in fact, overall, women’s employment is 19% more at risk than men’s,’ she added.UN Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner said that over 100 million women can be lifted out poverty if the countries implement a strategy to provide them with better access to education and family planning, fair and equal wages, and expanding social transfers.
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