Cáritas Diocesana de Girona warns of a “chronification of poverty” in the district that mainly affects women. 60% of the users who come to the entity are, a situation that has been consolidated in recent years and there are more and more young people who need its service.
In 2023, one in three users was under 35 years old, which “concerns” Cáritas.
Another increasingly common group is single-parent families, which since 2020 has gone from 8% to around 25%. Furthermore, the vast majority are women with dependent children whose main obstacle is access to housing, since they constantly encounter the owners’ refusal to rent the property to them.
This Thursday the report of Cáritas Diocesana in the district was presented in Girona. In total, the entity has served 27,310 people in all the regions of Girona, most of them women. Something that is common and that leads the entity’s Analysis Manager, Caye Gómez, to talk about “feminization of poverty.” The reality is that in recent years the number of women who must be cared for by Cáritas has not stopped growing, but the group under 35 years of age has also grown significantly, which now represents 40% of the total. These are young people who must go to Cáritas so that they do not make ends meet, although some have jobs.
In fact, the so-called “poor workers” are increasingly common, as a result of the rise in energy prices and the shopping basket. Some of those who come to Cáritas are people with precarious jobs and in other cases single-parent families. This group, which already represents one in four users, also suffers from the added difficulty of finding rental housing.
The problem, explains the director of Cáritas in Girona, Dolors Puigdevall, is that many owners choose not to rent the apartment to these families, seeing that they only have one income and have dependent children. “This is a shame and we must denounce it,” she says.
In this sense, Gómez highlighted that many of these families live in a single room that is rented out and, in many cases, there are minors “with the difficulties that this entails when it comes to living a normal life with the rest of the tenants.” Puigdevall and Gómez highlighted the importance of having a “very important” territorial network with 287 service points distributed throughout the territory.
