The number of people living below Colombia’s poverty line dropped while people who consider themselves poor went up, according to statistics agency DANE.
In its annual report on poverty, DANE said that 36.6% of Colombians lived below the poverty line in 2022.
This means that almost 19 million people lived off less than $97.94 (COP397,000) per month.
The percentage of the population that lived below the poverty line dropped 3.1 percentage points compared to 2021 when 39.7% of the population lived in poverty.
More than 7.1 million of Colombia’s poor — or 13.8% of the total population — lived off less than $49 (COP198,698) per month.
The group of people living in extreme poverty went up 0.1 percentage point compared to 2021.
The governments of President Gustavo Petro and former President Ivan Duque have introduced multiple measures to combat poverty in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic that triggered an economic crisis.
These policies reduced the number of people living below the poverty line, but failed to have a positive impact on the perception of poverty, according to the DANE.
A poll conducted by the statistics agency showed that 30.9% of urban dwellers did not have enough money for at least three meals a day in June of this year.
This is considerably more than in 2022 when 22.7% of the same group of people said they ate less than three meals a day.
The same poll also showed that half of the people in Colombia considered themselves poor.