CHRISTIAN aid agencies have warned that young Europeans are particularly affected by rising joblessness and social problems, amid growing hardships caused by the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis.
“Youth were hit particularly hard by the Covid-19 crisis, with employment rates falling and mental health and well-being worsening,” Eurodiaconia has said in a statement. The Brussels-based network represents 52 Churches and Christian social organisations from across Europe.
“Concerningly, the unemployment rate of young people in the European Union is 2.5 times higher than the general rate, while one in four are at risk of social exclusion and poverty. . . Eurodiaconia will take these messages from our members in a re-energised commitment to ensuring youth are supported in holistic ways.”
The statement was issued after the network, whose 800,000 staff run 30,000 service centres around Europe, hosted a meeting on youth opportunities.
Parallel warnings were also issued this week by the Roman Catholic organisation Caritas-Europa, which said that one in four EU children had already faced poverty. This was before a new onset of inflation and a mass influx of Ukrainian refugees.
It said that the EU’s Child Guarantee programme, adopted last year, had pledged “free and effective access” to education, health care, housing, and nutrition, especially for children from disadvantaged and low-income families, but said that only 14 of the 27 member-states had so far followed this up with “tangible social protection policies.
“It is not easy to build more schools, kindergartens, paediatric hospitals, and affordable housing in just one year — nor can we ask employers to increase overnight the salaries of single parents struggling with their bills,” Caritas-Europa, which includes Church-backed member-charities in 46 European countries, said on Monday.
“If not tackled, however, child poverty can lead to intergenerational poverty, exacerbated by social exclusion, violence, lack of affordable housing, and discrimination. . . Charity plays its role in trying to end child poverty, but is not enough. We cannot replace the work of the authorities, nor do it to the same scale.”
The EU declared a 2022 European Year of Youth, after warnings by its Eurostat agency that poverty, already affecting more than 19 million children, had worsened with the war in Ukraine.
In a statement last week, however, Eurostat said that conditions had since worsened. Almost 22 per cent of the EU’s population were now in hardship, and 65 per cent of all unemployed and 24 per cent of self-employed were also in danger of poverty.
In a mid-September report, Eurodiaconia said that a “further increase in child poverty” was to be expected over coming months, and urged the EU to ensure “full implementation” of the Child Guarantee in all member-states, while mobilising “national and EU resources” to overcome youth vulnerabilities in “gender, disability, anti-racism, and discrimination”.
Caritas-Europa’s secretary-general, Maria Nyman, warned on Monday that the EU was still a long way from meeting its Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2030.
Church charities across Europe all faced the same challenges, she said, and were collaborating closely to “put the most excluded at the centre of every decision made at national and European level”.