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One in three residents in Malaga is at risk of poverty or social exclusion, according to a report presented on Wednesday by the Andalusian Network Against Poverty and Social Exclusion (EAPN-A).
This means that more than 601,000 of the province's 1.78 million inhabitants suffer from "material, social or employment deprivation". As the study shows, the poverty rate in Malaga measured by the AROPE indicator (the at-risk-of-poverty or social exclusion rate, which includes in the calculation both indicators of economic deprivation and social and labour deprivation) reached 34.3% of the population in 2023, compared to 33.1% a year earlier.
This is a somewhat lower proportion than in the rest of Andalucía. Taking the region as a whole, 37.5% of the population was at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2023. That amounts to some 3.2 million people, a figure that represents a growth of some 174,000 people compared to a year earlier. However, the percentage of people falling into this risk level in Malaga exceeds the Spanish average that stands at 26.5%.
In any case, and in all regions, according to EAPN-A, the risk of poverty or social exclusion has increased in the last year due to the rise in prices and the energy crisis and, above all, due to the cost of housing, which has been aggravated by the rise in mortgages and increases in rents.
According to Julio García Daza, president of the Arrabal-AID association, when commenting on the progress of poverty in this century, the pandemic increased the pernicious effects of the major recession that followed the economic crisis that began in 2008.
So, while employment has recently recovered, purchasing power has not. This, he says, is what has been exacerbated in Malaga, because wages are lower than in Spain as its GDP relies heavily on tertiary industries and housing is now more expensive.
The EAPN-A report is peppered with data that highlights the situation of housing shortages: for example, that the price of rent has risen by 65% in the last three decades and swallows up half the family income, or that the average price of buying a house in Malaga is one of the highest in Spain only behind Madrid or Barcelona.
García Daza points out that the latter is even more concerning when you look at the fact that the average salary in Malaga province - 20,600 euros per year - is below the Spanish average of 22,383 euros.
"Having a job does not solve the problem of guaranteed income," states the report. The report does acknowledge that Spain's latest labour force survey (EPA) shows better data than the previous year for Malaga in terms of unemployment and employment rates, with more than 700,000 employed people in the province, as well as with a growing proportion of permanent contracts compared to temporary ones.
However, long-term unemployment remains a black spot, making up almost 42% of all unemployed, and these are mainly women. In fact, another of the elements highlighted by the research is the feminisation of poverty, to the point that Salima El Meziani Kabbouch, coordinator of Codenaf (Cooperation and Development with North Africa), states: "Poverty has a woman's face, with a profile of a single woman with dependent children." According to the report, nearly half of all women in employment in the province suffer from job insecurity.
Returning to the relationship between the labour market and housing, despite the improvements seen in the figures on Malaga's jobs market, the low salaries in relation to other locations in Spain and the high price of flats for both purchase and rent are factors that explain why, in 2023, applications for subsidised housing in the Malaga province reached a total of 32,354, making it the third province with the highest number of requests.
"It is necessary to establish measures to promote housing plans, with coordination between governing bodies to put an end to the serious housing problem, increasing subsidised housing, especially social housing for people at risk of exclusion," the report states.
Another indicator of material deprivation is the increase in the number of people applying for aid to cover the cost of the school meals service as well as study grants and other subsidies. However, these measures do not alleviate another of the problems identified in the study: the early school dropout rate in Malaga is 15.9%, above the Andalusian and national averages.
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