Poverty comprises a lack of information access and health
Countries were higher records of mortality rates are the poorest ones. Sanitary conditions worsen if the population does not develop on an economically productive zone. The WHO has acknowledge that nowadays, poverty is not only economic, but the result of a combination of factors where income is just one piece of the whole problem.
Poverty is characterized by the deprivation or lack of access to the means necessary for a person to develop economically. This concept also involves a lack to access health attention, information, and to an environment that allows a healthy life. In Mexico, near to 50.6 million people are unable to cover their basic needs of health, education, nutrition, housing, clothing, or public transportation.
In Mexico, most of the population is young. More than 38 million boys, girls, and teenagers are the most vulnerable to suffer deprivation and scarcity. In recent years there has been an important decrease on the percentage of kids that suffer severe deprivation, especially regarding health, water, and information; however, the numbers are still up high. 25.5% of kids and teenagers do not have access to a basic food basket, 34% suffers scarcity of health and education, and 59.5% does not have access to housing, transportations, basic clothing. All this according to numbers from the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure (ENIGH) of 2008.
The Mexican government uses a multidimensional methodology to measure poverty, based on the compliance analysis of social human rights like health, education, social security, social cohesion level, house services, and it matches with the methodology used by the UNICEF. Through this measure, the data extraction shows that 44.2% of the population lives in poverty, 33.7%, or around 36 million Mexicans, live in moderate poverty, and 10.5%, or around 11.2 million live in extreme poverty.
This data show that kids and teenagers are affected disproportionately by poverty and the deprivation of their basic right, 51.3% of them live in poverty, a 44.2% of the total Mexican population.
In Mexico there’s still a need to respond better to the healthy need of people with less resources, to improve and develop politics and systems that guaranty low resources people to access healthy technological advantages. It is an important point to work and confront inequality.
And yet still, Mexico is among the groups of countries with a high Human Development Index (HDI), in contrast with the inequality of development among some States of the country.
Reviewers: Brenda Giselle Alvarez Rodriguez (Public Health Research Unit), and Cassandra Saldaña Pineda (Knowledge Management Unit).
Fuentes: UNICEF, WHO.