Child Poverty in Mongolia

When I clicked on the website www.childhoodpoverty.org, the website would not come up. So I did research on the country of Mongolia.

Poverty is a recent reality in Mongolia. Until about 1990 there were virtually no poor people in rural areas. The government and rural collectives made sure that everyone was supplied with basic goods and access to a full range of public services. Poverty has been a direct consequence of the transition to a market economy in the 1990s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Mongolia's centrally planned economy. Privatization of industry and state farms brought high levels of unemployment. Benefits and assistance dried up. Incomes shrank, inflation devoured purchasing power and people had to bear the cost of health and education services.

Presently, one in three people in Mongolia are poor, and the number of poor people grows as the income gap widens. Poverty is becoming entrenched not only in urban centre but also in rural areas, where about half of the country’s poor people live.

Rural poor people in Mongolia include:

• women who are heads of households
• members of households with more than four children
• families of small herders
• unemployed people
• people without basic education
• vulnerable groups, such as the elderly and disabled people, and orphaned children

Poverty is more likely to affect women than men. In 2002, more than 55,000 households in Mongolia were headed by women, 250 per cent more than in 1990. One in four of these families have six or more children. At least half of the households headed by women are poor.

Rural Poverty Portal. Rural Poverty in Mongolia. (2014). Retrieved March 22,, 2014, from http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/country/home/tags/mongolia