Corona causes food, clothing crisis for poor

Charity organisations of the country are facing tremendous pressures due to increasing number of requests to get food and clothing from low-income people.

Some of the families may need to wait for weeks to get assistance due to the long queue, reported the national broadcaster Yle quoting charity organisations.

Referring to a recent report by the Central Union for Child Welfare, the Yle report said the household incomes of about 100,000 Finnish children fell below the poverty line during the coronavirus spring and many families face a shortage of food and clothing.

A charitable organisation, Hope, which offers aid to low-income families with children, told Yle that it is experiencing the busiest late-summer season in its history.

“When we started accepting applications from those seeking aid earlier this month, in five days we received requests from more than a thousand families with children. So far, we have received 2,300 requests," Hope CEO Eveliina Hostila told Yle.

The increasing number of unemployment and lay-offs following the coronavirus outbreak threw many people in the country into dire circumstances over a period of weeks.

Unemployment funds also reported serious congestion in the processing of unemployment benefits, further exacerbating the situation.

“However, these are only surface-level problems. Many of these families were already in bad situations in the past and the pandemic only worsened their plight,” the Yle report quoted Hostila as saying.