The National Administrative Department of Statistics (Dane) presented the data on monetary poverty in Colombia for 2021. According to the entity, during the second year of the pandemic, there were 19.6 million people in poverty. This means that this number of people lived this year with less than $354,031 ($89) on average monthly.
The incidence of this scourge is 39.3% of the national population. When disaggregating by domains, it is evident that in the capitals and rural areas the incidence is higher, reaching 44.6%, while in urban areas it was 37.8 percent. This means that in rural areas and capitals poverty was greater in sight during 2020, when it impacted 42.9% of the population.
The reduction compared to 2020 was 1.4 million people. The comparison with 2019 shows that there are 2.15 million more people in this condition compared to those seen in the pre-pandemic. The greatest lag in terms of recovery of people in this condition is found in Bogotá, Medellín and rural areas. Juan Daniel Oviedo, director of the department, pointed out that food inflation generated a direct impact on the result evidenced at the end of the year.
The biennial comparison made it possible to show that there is still a gap compared to the pre-pandemic reference. When comparing the figures, the difference is 3.6% percentage points that still needs to be recovered. In terms of extreme monetary poverty, the Department reported that this affected 6.1 million people with a total incidence of 12.2% of the inhabitants of the national territory.