Compassion in Peru

Over the past few decades, Peru’s poverty rate has dropped significantly. In 2000, 16.7% of the population lived on less than $1.90 per day. This percentage dropped to 3% in 2015. Mining exports have fuelled much of the nation’s economic growth, as world demand for natural resources, such as silver and copper, has increased over previous years; but the nation’s heavy reliance on natural resource exports makes the country vulnerable to shocks in world prices.

However, the percentage of Peruvians living in poverty increased in 2017. This recent turnaround is a worrying development and more than 6.9 million people now live in poverty, most in rural areas. Indigenous people are disproportionately affected.

Children still face many hardships and issues related to poverty. Between a quarter and a third of children aged six to 14 work, sometimes in dangerous conditions in mines or on construction sites. For many families, the choice to send their children to work is made by the confronting reality that an extra daily wage means food on the table. Undernutrition and anaemia are areas of national concern for Peruvian children.

Lack of access to public services, coupled with the fact that rural youth predominantly speak an indigenous language (rather than Spanish), contributes to lower school enrolment of children in Peru’s rural areas. The rate of urbanisation in Peru has continued to increase as youth move to the cities in search of employment.

According to Peruvian anthropologist José Matos Mar, the increase in urbanisation, accompanied by the increase in educated youth from a variety of backgrounds in cities, has led to a reduction in racism and marginalisation based on ethnicity or cultural heritage. But these social stigmas haven’t disappeared entirely. Marginalisation still persists based on education level, poverty, gender and indigenous background. As a result, when rural youth migrate to Peru’s cities, they are increasingly unable to find work in the formal labour sector and resort to employment in the informal sector, where monitoring of work conditions and wages is likely to remain low.