The latest lockdown induced by the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic added an estimated 32.4 million (19.54 per cent) people to the “new poor” group in August, a survey has found.
It found 21.24 per cent of the population became “new poor” in June last year after the first lockdown.
The situation improved in March this year as the proportion of the “new poor” fell to 14.75 per cent, before rising to 19.54 per cent in August.
The survey also found the latest lockdown had severely disrupted and reversed the recovery trend of livelihoods of urban slum and rural households in Bangladesh, which had gradually been recovering since being severely hit by the first lockdown in April last year.
The findings of the fourth round of the livelihoods survey, a joint initiative of BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) and Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC), were revealed at a webinar on Thursday.
The fourth round was conducted in August among 4,872 households in rural areas and urban slums. The previous three rounds were carried out in April and June 2020, and March 2021.
“We need to unpack recovery and resilience,” BIGD Executive Director Dr Imran Matin told the webinar.
“We find that the mechanisms of recovery and resilience adopted by many, especially the ‘new poor’, are what we call ‘distressed’ and have the risk of deepening long-term poverty and vulnerabilities,” he said.
“We need to pay urgent attention to these regressive reversals,” he added.
The survey found that income in August had dropped by 18 per cent in slums and 15 per cent in villages from the levels in March this year, which signalled a new reversal in the recovery trend.
While the majority agreed that the latest lockdown was a good decision, almost half mentioned the livelihood crisis the lockdown had brought for them.
More than two-thirds, mostly poorer people with lower education levels, said they could not find enough work.
Forty-five per cent of households received some relief during the first lockdown while it was only 23 per cent this time.
Livelihood recovery reversed as a result, and in August, average income was 23 per cent lower than pre-Covid-19 levels, with lesser reversal in villages (12 per cent lower) and higher reversal in urban slums (30 per cent lower).
Ten per cent of those who were employed before the pandemic were not engaged in any income-generating activities when the survey was done.
Besides, income and employment uncertainties over 18 months gave rise to several vulnerabilities.
Many switched occupations, often accepting whatever they found for survival, creating a risk of shifting to worse jobs.
For example, 17 per cent of skilled workers, such as electricians, had to take on jobs as unskilled workers, such as day labourers.
Outstanding debt increased consistently during the pandemic, from 13 per cent of average yearly household income just before the pandemic in February 2020 to 28 per cent in August this year.
The majority of the households are not consuming any meat, milk, or fruit, and per capita food expenditure is still much below the pre-Covid-19 level for vulnerable populations, especially children. This can have grave long-term consequences, the survey said.
Most likely to avoid high living costs in cities, 10 per cent of slum dwellers moved back to villages or cheaper cities and have not come back.
All these factors can have a long-term impact on the livelihoods of the affected families, the survey noted.
Of the surveyed households, the within-sample poverty rate remained 17 percentage points higher than that of the pre-Covid-19 level.
The situation remained much worse in urban slums where 77 per cent of the surveyed households were poor in terms of daily income, 22 percentage points higher than that of the pre-Covid-19 level.
Rural and urban slum households that were vulnerable non-poor before Covid-19, meaning their income was above the upper poverty line but below the median national income, remained the most affected population group. Two-thirds of the households in this group were in poverty in August.
These households were identified as the “new poor” population of Bangladesh.
Additionally, many of the “new poor” households seemed to have fallen into longer-term poverty.
At least 29 per cent of the households with income above the poverty line in the sample became poor as soon as the pandemic hit and could not manage to get out of poverty since then.
This is grave news as longer-term poverty can erode the resilience of these families and put them in a poverty trap, the survey said.
PPRC Chairman Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman said the threat of new infection waves remained real.
He said recovery disruptions could not be minimised without an integrated approach combining health, administrative, and economic policies.
“The Covid-19 response fundamentally is also a question of social justice. We cannot simply leave the less well-off groups to fend for themselves with token or no policy support,” he explained.
“Scaled-up urban social protection; budgetary action plans for the cottage, small, and medium enterprise (CSME) recovery; macro policy steps to address rising cost burdens of healthcare, education, transport, and utilities; and ramping up vaccination and awareness are immediate priorities,” he added.
