Over 70 people regularly visit Patricia’s soup kitchen in the province of Catamarca. Fifty-six of them are children. “As a mother, it breaks me up. I’d often like to give more to help all those who come asking but with the little I’m given, I cannot,” she tells Perfil.
Patricia’s project, Una Sonrisa para los Niños (“A Smile for Children”), began in 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic as a soup canteen, but deteriorating conditions meant that increasingly less people could help out: “I had to close down both the breakfast service and between meals. Today, only the soup kitchen functions with assistance from the local government, which only suffices for three days a week. Where I live, you see much hardship,” she adds.
Children are the most affected by poverty. According to the latest report by the Observatorio de la Deuda Social watchdog of Catholic University of Argentina (UCA), there is a pronounced regional inequality “making evident the existence of multiple childhood patterns in such a diverse territory.”
While the official child poverty statistics present a steep peak during the first half of 2024, dropping in the second half of the same year, the dip was uneven. In some places, the situation even worsened.
In Concordia, Entre Ríos Province, the number of children considered poor rose from 68.4 to 75 percent between the second halves of 2023 and 2024. In Greater Salta and Greater Catamarca it inched up from 55.1 to 56.3 percent and from 60.1 to 60.4 percent respectively, while in Posadas, the capital of Misiones Province, it rose from 55 to 61.4 percent.
“The urban sprawls of Southern Argentina and Buenos Aires City managed to return to previous levels or even improve on [levels in] the first half of 2023, showing a certain capacity to recover. In contrast, the urban sprawls of northern Argentina are not only based upon historically high levels but, while improving on the mid-2024 peak, do not manage to return to the previous child poverty levels, thus consolidating a situation of greater structural vulnerability,” warned the UCA body in a report analysing the evolution of poverty from the first half of 2023 to the second half of 2024.
The study clearly highlights that the north-western and north-eastern regions are the most affected
“The improvement at national level is not reflected in these territories, which deviate from the average and where poverty persists or increases. At the end of that period only one northern locality managed to be below the national average, Palpalá in Jujy, while all other northwestern and northeastern places present a child poverty rate superior to the average,” continues the report.
The nationwide average for child poverty dropped from 58.8 to 52.8 percent between the second halves of 2023 and 2024. During the first half of the latter it reached 67.3 percent – the highest number registered since the crisis of 2001.
The professionals behind the report affirm that Argentina is “a country split in two.” Between the first half of 2023 and the last of 2024 “half the population centres improve and the other half worsen in terms of child poverty,” they write.
The latter occurs in territories where “poverty was already high and keeps growing.” In contrast, they add, centres like this City, Greater Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Bahía Blanca and Neuquén managed to lower their levels to among the lowest. Although the total data presents an improvement, “this improvement is not reflected in every case while the territorial gaps persist or even widen.”
Child poverty has a knock-on effect on education and the exploitation of child labour. In the region where Patricia has her soup kitchen, child labour exceeds the general average – according to the latest available data from the Observatorio de Trabajo Infantil y Adolescente watchdog (from 2017), nationwide 10 percent of children aged between five and 15 are engaged in productive activity. But in the regions of the Northwest and Northeast, that rose to 13.6 and 13.1 percent, respectively.
Furthermore, the regions with the greatest child poverty are also those which presented the worst results in the Aprender 2024 scholastic aptitude tests. In the area of language, for example, while in Central and Southern Argentina 14 percent of schoolchildren scored below the basic level, in the regions of the Northwest and Northeast, this percentage topped 19 percent while 16 percent in the Cuyo región (Western Argentina).
Some of the children going to Patricia’s soup kitchen every Monday, Wednesday and Friday lack even the basic elements for attending school: from utensils to a coat and footwear, she comments.
To that is added the lack of donations. “The food we receive is enough for 50 people, we stretch it as much as we can,” she explains to Perfil.
While demand at her soup kitchen grows, organisations denouncing the Human Capital Ministry for its failure to deliver food affirms that the portfolio run by Sandra Pettovello has only ensured regular distribution for 50 soup kitchens. The rest survive on donations and the goodwill of the general population.
Patricia asks those interested in donating to come forward personally.
“Every day people knock at my door for a plate of food. In election campaigns they come forward to help out but they don’t return afterwards. Unfortunately they fail to remember that children and other people do not only need feeding in political times,” she concluded.
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