“Our only source of income is the few thousand dinars (1,000 IQD = $0.84) my husband makes from polishing shoes daily and this has forced us to have our children drop out of school,” said Samia Mirza, a mother of six from Duhok.
“Most nights our kids fall asleep without a bite to eat, and if my husband fails to provide for one day, the only money we have would be from people’s donations and mercy,” she said.
The government’s social welfare office is seeing more people needing their help. “With the COVID-19 outbreak in the province, more families have visited us and asked for financial assistance, because many people have lost their jobs, but the exact numbers of how many families are in need of assistance is still unclear,” Sherzad Hamed, head of the province’s General Directorate of Social Development, told Rudaw English.
His office has begun a field survey in collaboration with United Nations children’s organization UNICEF in order to determine the number of families living in poverty.
According to the Kurdistan Region Statistics Office, the poverty rate in Duhok, with a population of 1.6 million, stood at 8.5 percent in 2018.
Low oil prices earlier this year left the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) strapped for cash, unable to pay its public sector employees without assistance from Baghdad, which is facing its own economic crisis. Erbil is deep in talks with the federal government over the 2021 budget, but expects to get less money as Iraq runs a deficit. “The Iraqi government will send funds that are less than the constitutional financial entitlements of the Kurdistan Region,” KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani told the parliament last week.
The financial crisis and measures to curb spread of the COVID-19 virus have also hit the private sector and small businesses are struggling. “Many people come into the store asking to take products on credit, and sometimes the products are worth around 250 to 500 Iraqi dinars ($0.21- $0.42). Some even ask for debt, because they are in a very bad state financially,” Hawar Aber, a store owner in Duhok, told Rudaw.
The United Nations expects the poverty rate in Iraq will rise from 20 percent 31 percent by the end of 2020, it stated in a report on October 6, 2020 in collaboration with the World Bank.
Globally, after more than 20 years of falling numbers, the World Bank expects extreme poverty rates to increase this year as the world fights the pandemic.
The Kurdistan region has recorded over 900 new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of cases over 59,000.
By Dilan S. Hussein
Additional reporting by Ayub Nasri
