In Spain, one in three children under the age of 18 is at risk of poverty. This is reflected in the data from the Spanish consultancy AIS Group, a specialist in big data and analytics, on the risk of child poverty, derived from its socio-demographic and economic indicators.
These indicators are constructed based on information from multiple sources, both public and private, including the INE, the land registry, the SEPE, and the Atlas of Income, which translate into a segmentation of Spanish families into typologies based on their socio-demographic and economic characteristics, their spending profiles, income, etc.
According to Habits information, 30.2% of the child and youth population resides in households whose income is below the threshold that determines the risk of poverty, which in 2022 was 10,088 euros for single-person households, and 21,185 euros for households made up of two adults and two minors.
Canary Islands does not obtain a good position in the report on the risk of poverty in Spain, since its ratio amounts to 34.2%, the fifth highest in the entire State. By provinces, Tenerife presents a slightly higher record, 34.8%, compared to 33.6% in Las Palmas.
“At the territorial level, the map shows a large north-south barrier,” comments Germán Sánchez, head of Big Data and Analytics at AIS. “Thus, the communities with the largest child population at risk are located in the southern part of the country, led by Extremadura, where the total number of children under 18 at risk of poverty is barely two tenths below 40%.”
After Extremadura, the communities with the highest percentage of minors at risk of poverty are Andalusia (38.5%), Region of Murcia (36.8%), Castilla La Mancha (34.9%) and Canary Islands (34.2%). It is followed by La Rioja, with 34% of the child and youth population at risk of poverty, the only community in the northern half of the territory that presents a percentage higher than the national average.
“In the northern zone, the percentages present a somewhat more favorable, but also improvable, situation,” indicates Sánchez. The community with the lowest volume of children at risk of poverty is the Basque Country, where the average is 20.9%. At a certain distance appears Catalonia, the second with the lowest percentage of vulnerable child population, which registers 24.3%. Also below 25% are the Balearic Islands (24.6%) and Cantabria (24.8%).
Granada, the province with the highest volume of minors at risk
In provincial terms, Granada, with 42.8%, is the one with the highest percentage of child population at risk of poverty.
Almería is the next province with the worst data, with 42.1% of minors at risk. After it, Jaén, where the risk of poverty rate among this group stands at 40.2%. Just one tenth less occurs in Cáceres, which closes the set of areas that present percentages higher than 40% for this indicator.
Gipuzkoa is for its part the province with the lowest rate of risk of poverty among minors, 17.2%. It is the only province that presents a percentage below 20%.
Barcelona is the second with the best record, 21.5%. Practically the same is in Bizkaia, where the percentage is 21.6%, while in A Coruña it already amounts to 22%.
Objective: eradication of poverty
The fight against poverty is one of the objectives set by the United Nations in its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and by the Government of Spain in the Objectives of the Urban Agenda.
That is why a selection of the Habits indicators, such as the rate of child population at risk of poverty, has been integrated into a tool called SDG Maps that AIS has developed in collaboration with two partners, Esri España and the Observatorio de la Sostenibilidad.
SDG Maps has 300 indicators with socio-demographic, economic, environmental and territorial information that provide key information to calculate the degree of progress of each municipality or region in each of the SDGs or objectives of the Urban Agenda. In addition, it has a set of preconfigured geographic maps and dashboards to facilitate the interpretation of the data by all users.
