 |
LATIN AMERICA |
| |
Poverty
Level of Brazilian Children Remains High
RIO DE JANEIRO
- Despite the decrease in Brazil's social
inequality indicators in the past few years,
recent studies have shown that the poverty
level of the country's children and
adolescents remains high.
According to Summary of Social Indicators
(SIS) released recently by the Brazilian
Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE),
some 26.2 percent of the Brazilian children
lived in families with household per capital
income equal to half a minimum wage in 2008,
down from 32.4 percent in 1998.
In 2008, Brazil's minimum wage was 415 reais
(244 U.S. dollars). This year, it increased
to 465 reais (273 U.S. dollars).
The IBGE attributed the improvement to the
government's successful programs implemented
in the past years and the stabilization of
the country's economy.
In the poorer northeastern region, 66.7
percent of the children, teenagers and
youngsters still lived in poverty, while in
the richer and more developed southern
region, the figure fell to 28.7percent, the
report said.
The study highlighted that household income
helped determine school attendance rate,
which increased as the level of families'
income did.
For children of four to six years old, the
rate of school attendance was 77.1 percent
for families living with a per capital
income of half a minimum wage and the figure
jumped to 98.8 percent for those with a per
capita income of three times of a minimum
wage, according to the report.
The school attendance rate of teenagers aged
15 to 17 in the poorest 20 percent families
was 78.4 percent and for teenagers in the
richest 20 percent families, the figure was
93.7 percent.
The trend to increase of attendance to
school in infancy was observed, although at
a lower rhythm. The biggest increase of the
rate occurred in the group aged four to six,
from 57.9 percent to 79.8 percent between
1998 and 2008, the report said, adding that
among children aged zero to three, school
attendance rate changed from 8.7 percent to
18.1 percent in the same period.
The percentage of youngsters attending
university recorded a big increase in the
past decade. In the group aged 18 to 24,
13.9 percent of youngsters attended colleges
in 2008, up from 6.9 percent in 1998.
The increase could be attributed to the
improvement of the infrastructure of public
universities and more scholarships offered
by the government to private institutions.
Even so, the percentage was low compared
with developed countries such as France and
Britain, where the proportion was 50 percent
higher, or some other Latin American nations
such as Chile with 52 percent, said the
report.
On the other hand, there was significant
improvement in the distribution of
attendance by level of schooling among the
white, black and brown Brazilians from 1998
to 2008.
In 2008, white youngsters aged 18 to 24
attending high school made up 60.3 percent
of the total, whereas among blacks and
browns, the rate was 28.7 percent, according
to the report.
In 2008, in terms of the years of schooling
of the population aged 15 and above, white
Brazilians had an average of 8.3 years of
schooling while the blacks and browns had an
average of 6.7 and 6.5 years of schooling
respectively.
Even though the educational indicators
improved significantly from 1998 to 2008,
many children in Brazil still had to quit
school to get a job.
According to the IBGE, there were 4.5
million workers aged five to 17 in Brazil in
2008, which amounted to 10.2 percent of the
total population in this age group.
And there were sharp differences among the
regions in terms of child labors. In the
northeast of the country, the number of
child labors aged five to 17 reached 1.7
million which meant 12.3 percent of the
population in this age group, the IBGE said.
While in the southeastern region, the
figures fell to 1.3 million, or 7.9 percent
of the population in this age group, it
added. |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
