Class cancelled: how Covid school closures blocked routes out of poverty

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Admin

Oxford University project reveals devastating impact on prospects for world’s poorest students, especially girls

In the coffee-farming communities of the Peruvian Amazon, the classroom is a route out of poverty. Gabriela was studying civil engineering in a city an hour and a half from home when the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

The 18-year-old, who is one of thousands of young people tracked since 2002 as part of the Young Lives project led by the University of Oxford, has been forced to postpone her education, in a country where 16% of 19-year-olds have dropped out of education because of the crisis.

Decades of progress on extreme poverty now in reverse due to Covid

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Admin

Analysis: The pandemic, combined with the climate crisis and crippling debt burdens, has led to an ‘unprecedented increase’ in poverty, experts warn

Opinion: Rishi Sunak is paying Covid bills off the backs of the poor. It shames our country | Gordon Brown

Two decades of progress in the reduction of extreme poverty, the elimination of which is one of the sustainable development goals, have been pushed into a sharp reverse by a combination of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing climate emergency and increasing debt.

With the World Bank warning of a “truly unprecedented increase” in levels of poverty this year, and renewing calls for debt forgiveness, experts are warning of a growing crisis in multiple areas from education to employment, likely to be felt for years to come.

EU ‘not fit for purpose’ to reduce poverty in Europe, says UN envoy

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Admin

Brexit risks exacerbating poverty issues, says human rights envoy after two-month investigation

The European Union is “not fit for purpose” in the task of reducing poverty in Europe and Brexit risks exacerbating the problem, the UN’s special envoy on human rights has said after a two-month investigation.

Prof Olivier De Schutter, who was given access to senior officials across the bloc’s institutions, said the EU’s “constitutional framework” was driving a race to the bottom in corporation and income tax and salary levels.

Marcus Rashford: the making of a food superhero

Posted on January 17, 2021 by Admin

Coaches, charity workers – and the footballer himself – reveal what drives the man who twice tackled Boris Johnson on child hunger and won

Show me the child at seven and I will show you the man, the old wisdom says. But in football terms, you never know, not really, which kids are going to make it as players at that age and which are not. Still, looking back at his memories of Marcus Rashford, Dave Horrocks, his first football coach, does remember one thing about him very clearly.

Rashford had first come along to Horrocks’s community club, Fletcher Moss Rangers, as a scrawny five-year-old. From the beginning, Horrocks recalls, he was the kid who left absolutely every atom of energy out on the pitch. Whenever the coach gave him a lift home from training, Rashford would get in the back of the car and – unlike other livewire boys – immediately fall into a deep sleep. When the car pulled up outside his house, Rashford would then jump out, refreshed, pick up a ball, and start practising some more on the patch of grass outside.

The Guardian charity telethon – talk to your favourite journalists

Posted on December 19, 2020 by Admin

Help disadvantaged young people by calling Marina Hyde, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland and others on Saturday

Please donate to our appeal here

It’s your chance to discuss this extraordinary year, one-to-one, with your favourite journalists. Marina Hyde, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland, Anushka Asthana, Owen Jones and others will be taking your calls and donations at the Guardian and Observer 2020 charity appeal telethon this Saturday.

This year’s appeal cause is disadvantaged young people, and we are raising money for three charities doing fantastic work at the sharp end of the Covid-19 social crisis: UK Youth, which funds grassroots youth work schemes; Young Minds, which helps young people with mental health support; and the anti-poverty campaigners Child Poverty Action Group.

Unicef to feed hungry children in UK for first time in 70-year history

Posted on December 16, 2020 by Admin

UN agency will help fund food parcels for those affected by coronavirus crisis in Southwark, south London

Unicef has launched a domestic emergency response in the UK for the first time in its more than 70-year history to help feed children hit by the Covid-19 crisis.

The UN agency, which is responsible for providing humanitarian aid to children worldwide, said the coronavirus pandemic was the most urgent crisis affecting children since the second world war.

‘Our school had children who couldn’t afford event days’

Posted on December 12, 2020 by Admin

The Child Poverty Action Group helped a Dundee primary make life better for deprived families

Please donate to our appeal here

It was the “special occasions” at her children’s school that Anna (name changed) struggled with. She and her partner both work but, with four children, stumping up the cash for Halloween costumes, Christmas jumper days or pyjama days was tricky.

“Sometimes we could manage, other times we couldn’t,” she said. “I’ve kept my kids off school in the past when we couldn’t afford to send them in with whatever it was that they were meant to have.” On other occasions, such as book fairs, she would have to borrow money.

Covid has ‘cut life expectancy in England and Wales by a year’

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Admin

Exclusive: Life expectancy has regressed to 2010 levels, say scientists, with poor hardest hit

The Covid-19 pandemic has cut life expectancy in England and Wales by roughly a year, scientists have estimated, reversing gains made since 2010.

A study, conducted by Oxford researchers, found that life expectancy at birth (LEB) had fallen by 0.9 and 1.2 years for females and males relative to 2019 levels respectively.

Help us prevent Covid creating a lost generation of young people | Katharine Viner

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Admin

Life chances are in danger of being blighted by the pandemic. That’s why young people are at the heart of our charity appeal this year

Please donate to our appeal here

In a year of blight, uncertainty and lives interrupted, 21-year-old Aadam Patel’s experience of the pandemic will resonate among many young people and their families: “I have pressed pause on my life,” he told the Guardian in October, “and although I’m dying to resume it, I don’t even know if there’s a play button there any more.”

Getting life back on track during Covid has proved hard for many of us; but for millions of young people it will be a very major challenge. Society’s odds were already stacked against youngsters from economically deprived communities and from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds; the pandemic has brought those stark inequalities into even sharper focus, whether it is in the job market, around holiday hunger, or access to online schooling.

‘I want to give what I never had’: the trans mum taking in abandoned children in India

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Admin

Manisha was shunned as a child by her family and ended up on the streets – now she dreams of opening an orphanage

When Manisha walks into her rented room, crestfallen at having earned little money at work, her children rush to the door and cluster around, welcoming her with hugs. “When I feel their arms around me, my worries just melt away,” she says.

Manisha, a transgender woman who goes by only one name, is not their biological mother. She has taken in eight abandoned children over the years and now, aged 35, looks after six, two having recently left to get married.

Foreign rough sleepers face deportation from UK post-Brexit

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Admin

Policy is ‘huge step backwards’ that will prevent vulnerable people from seeking help, charities say

Foreign rough sleepers face being deported from Britain under draconian immigration laws to be introduced when the Brexit transition period ends.

Under the immigration rules to be laid before parliament and due to come into force on 1 January, rough sleeping will become grounds for refusal of, or cancellation of, permission to be in the UK.

London to face tighter Covid restrictions from Friday night

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Admin

No 10 also set to extend tier 3 lockdown measures to Greater Manchester as cases rise

London will be placed in high-risk, tier 2 coronavirus restrictions from Friday night as infection rates in the capital continue to increase, MPs and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, have confirmed.

The decision came as Boris Johnson was expected to sign off on the harshest tier 3 coronavirus measures for millions more people in the north of England later on Thursday, with Downing Street putting last minute pressure on local leaders in Greater Manchester to accept the changes.

Countryside fit for a superpower? Inside China’s colossal rural revamp

Posted on September 6, 2020 by Admin

Beneath the veneer of Xi Jinping’s ambitious agricultural plan farming communities remain marred by homelessness, poverty and unstable markets

The official pictures tell a delightful tale. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is seen touring fish farms, rice paddies and vineyards in Ningxia, ambling through lily fields in Shanxi, and inspecting mushroom- and fungus-growing operations in Shaanxi.

The carefully choreographed images aim to create a vision of his latest signature policy – rural revitalisation. Billions of dollars will be spent on revamping the countryside – increasing prosperity, improving its ecology, and integrating it with the development of China’s shining cities, which had largely left rural areas behind.

Thousands of high-risk offenders in UK ‘freed into homelessness’

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Admin

Report warns of reoffending risk as 3,713 ex-prisoners in England lack safe housing

Thousands of high-risk convicted criminals, including those classed as violent and sexual offenders, were being released from prison in England into homelessness, increasing the likelihood of their reoffending, inspectors warned.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) said in a report that it was “particularly disturbed” to find that at least 3,713 people supervised by the National Probation Service, which is responsible for high-risk offenders, had left prison and become homeless from 2018 to 2019.