This article was originally published June 9, 2019 by Paula Urien on La Nacion. Read the original article.

According to a report from Catholic University of Argentina (UCA)'s Social Debt Observatory, 51.7 percent of children live below the poverty line in Argentina. In 2017, it was recorded that 5,004,235 children from age of 0 to 17 years were poor. However, the number rose by 909,484 to 5,913,719 in 2018, according to the figures provided by Guido Lamarmora, an economist of Childhood Social Debt Barometer at the UCA.

The report noted that severe food insecurity affected 1,576,455 children of this age in 2018 (13 percent), 461,519 more than it was recorded in 2017, when there were 1,114,936 children in this situation (9.6 percent). The food risk in childhood increased between 2017 and 2018 by 35 percent. It further added that 29.3% of children lived in households that could not manage to cover the food needs of all their members due to economic problems. The last index report for poverty showed that 46.8 percent of children up to 15 years old in Argentina were in poverty by income.

The Observatory, which measures poverty also on the basis of deprivation in different dimensions of human development, estimated that 63.4 percent of children between 0 and 17 years old, in 2018, were deprived of at least one fundamental right - including access to food, health, housing, education, employment and social security systems.

Progress and Setbacks in the study of inequality are the second part of the report, with measurements for Argentine Social Debt from 2017 and 2018.

According to the UCA, while the government has public policies aimed at children but this transfer of income -- in the context of an economy that does not grow, is recessive, stagnant in its ability to create jobs, and has high inflation -- becomes insufficient to prevent the increase of child poverty.

Indigence in childhood increased 3.3 percentage points according to the last official report of the INDEC, national state statistics bureau. "Other direct indicators of extreme poverty such as food insecurity also recorded a very significant increase between 2017 and 2018. According to our records, the risk of food intake in childhood went from 9.6 percent to 13 percent in the last 6 months and this occurred despite the update of the value of the AUH and the expansion of food coverage in school and community canteens, that reached 36.6 percent of childhood in 2018 from 36.1% in 2017, "the UCA said. 

Health
Two out of ten children and adolescents did not get a medical consultation during 2018 as a preventive measure and 44 percent did not go to the dentist. In the last three years, public health coverage increased by 10 percent for children and reached 63% of children in the Greater Buenos Aires (and 55 percent at the urban average level).

Living Place 
Almost half of urban children live in environmentally contaminated conditions, 23.8 percent live in precarious housing, while 23.4 percent are in overcrowded conditions.

Physical Abuse
Abuse reached 24.8 percent in 2018 and "although it continues a positive trend in recent years, it tended to stagnate and reverse its trend", according to the UCA

Internet and Education
According to the estimates, in 2018, 47.7 percent of children and adolescents between the age of 5 and 17 years did not have access to Internet at home. Computer teaching in primary education was below 50.6 percent of students. On the other hand, one third of adolescents between 13 and 17 years of age did not attend school or are delayed on the journey.