The report Child Poverty in Namibia will be launched today by the Namibia Statistics Agency. It is the first child-centred analysis of the Namibian Household Income and Expenditure Survey (NHIES). The report provides an overview of the poverty trends since the last NHIES, before analysing the profile of child poverty, multiple deprivation and the impact of social grants on child poverty rates. It also provides a simulation of the impact of an expansion of child welfare grants from mostly orphans to the broader group of poor and vulnerable children, with costing of such an expansion for different scenarios, including a universal child welfare grant. Expanding the child welfare grants to cover all poor children would dramatically reduce child poverty from 34% to 13% and extreme child poverty from 18% to 3%.
