By João Marcelo
SAN PAOLO – Brazil registered, at the beginning of the year 2021, a jump in the extreme poverty rate. This happened after the end of emergency aid in December 2020. At the beginning of the year, 12.8% of the population, approximately 27 million Brazilians, started to live on less than R $ 246 per month (R $ 8.20 per day), which includes them in the calculated extreme poverty line. by FGV Social, with data presented by the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD Covid-19). In an interview with Dire agency, the director of FGV Social, Marcelo Neri, affirmed that the emergency aid was of great importance for the people and the economy of the country. “Basically, emergency aid was a direct injection of resources for the poorest. This has the property of making the wheels of the economy spin. Each dollar spent on income distribution programs causes GDP to increase threefold. Or that is, the fight against poverty is important, not only for the fight against poverty itself, but also for economic reasons “.
Another alarming number is about access to education. Because of the pandemic, classes had to move to the digital environment. In this matter, students from public schools were disadvantaged in relation to students from private schools, as Professor Neri explains. “There are two important channels that COVID-19 reaches that generates a permanent increase in inequality. First is the increase in inequality in education. The school day of a private school during the pandemic is three hours and six minutes, while a poor student of public school has two hours and one minute, this represents an extra hour for children from private schools “. This difference has a direct consequence on the future of these children, making it difficult to get jobs that require more qualification when they are going to compete for a place in the job market.
Young people aged 15 to 29 will also suffer directly from the impact of inequality in access to education.