Poverty surges up throughout in the South Asia Pacific zone during long time of Covid-19 pandemic time.

 Low-income families receive food assistance during a lockdown due to the pandemic in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

An estimated 75 million to 80 million more people in Asia and the Pacific were pushed into extreme poverty because of disruptions in economic activity due to COVID-19 last year, according to a recent report from the Asian Development Bank. Before the pandemic, the percent of the population living in extreme poverty was expected to decrease.

Data from a UN Women report provides essential insight into the health, economic, and social implications for COVID-19 recovery for women and girls in the Asia-Pacific region.

In more than one-third of the countries that reported data, unemployment increased by at least 20% last year. The report noted that many families were forced to cope by deferring payments, eating less, drawing from savings, borrowing money, selling property, or pawning assets. Strategies like these can have “long-term harmful or scarring effects,” the report stated. The pandemic threatens to reverse regional gains in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals in areas such as education, health, and nutrition.

While there has been progress in overall school completion rates in the region, the poorest 40% of children are still struggling for basic education and half of the countries that reported data documented reading and numeracy scores below 50%.

The pandemic has exacerbated this. Nearly half of the 463 million students globally who did not have access to online-based learning, or other educational broadcast platforms such as radio and television during school shutdowns were in the East Asia, Pacific subregions and South Asia regions.

Global extreme poverty is expected to rise in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years as the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic compounds the forces of conflict and climate change, which were already slowing poverty reduction progress, the World Bank said today.

The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021, depending on the severity of the economic contraction. Extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, is likely to affect between 9.1% and 9.4% of the world’s population in 2020, according to the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report. This would represent a regression to the rate of 9.2% in 2017. Had the pandemic not convulsed the globe, the poverty rate was expected to drop to 7.9% in 2020.