Poverty in Peru

After working for almost 20 years with poverty,
I came to understand that poverty is an incredibly complex world. It is not just about lack of money.
It is about lack of examples, encouragement and positive role models. It is about surviving today, not thinking about tomorrow or next week. It is about maintaining what you have, not taking risks, avoiding what is new and unknown. 


At Chaska we learned that there’s 3 main factors to poverty. They are all connected but affect poverty in different ways.

• Income. This is a very broad factor, being affected by; where you live, level of education, ethnicity, health, family size, …
• Vulnerability. Setbacks affect poor families in a big way due to lack of a social system to fall back on, lack of reserves and lack of opportunities
• Opportunity. The lack of access to good education and jobs, missing positive role models and acceptance are key factors that keep people from getting out of poverty, generation after generation.

Living standard in Peru has been going up at high rates between 2004 and 2016, reducing the population living in poverty from roughly 60% to 24%. 
After 2016 this slowed down considerably, reducing poverty further to about 20% of the population by 2019.
Due to the Covid pandemic this reversed and also split. In rural areas poverty went up to about 30% but urban poverty is now at around 45%.
(data from; World Bank (2023). Rising Strong: Peru Poverty and Equity Assessment. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.)

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