Colombia’s poverty rate dropped 3.2 percentage points to 39.3% in 2021 as the country tried to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, according to statistics agency DANE.
This implies that an estimated 19.6 million people in Colombia lived off less than $89.50 (COP354,031) per month.
Colombia’s extreme poverty rate of people living off less than $40.70 (COP161,099) per month went from 15.1% to 12.2% of the population between 2020 and last year.
Despite the significant drops, government efforts to combat poverty as part of its economic recovery plan failed to entirely undo the surge in poverty caused by the pandemic.
Last year’s rate was the highest since 2012 when 40.8% of the population lived below the poverty line.
Colombia’s poverty rate
Poverty did not drop everywhere in Colombia. In the northern Magdalena and La Guajira provinces, poverty went up respectively 0.3 and 1.1 percentage points.
In the southwestern Cauca province poverty went up 2.7 percentage points to 58.3%.
The coronavirus made La Guajira the poorest province in the country. The poverty rate in Colombia’s most northern province was 67.4% last year.
More than half of the people in eight of Colombia’s 32 provinces lived below the country’s national poverty line, according to the DANE.
Regional poverty distribution
Seven provinces in the east and southeast of the country were left out of the annual poverty census.
