For Hong Kong’s poor children, ‘home work’ means cooking, cleaning, caregiving and earning money for the family
- As poverty rate hits 12-year high, experts voice concerns for 274,900 children from poor homes
- Parents struggling to make ends meet rely on children to help at home, need more support services
Ming* has been spending an hour a day over the past six months collecting discarded cardboard on the streets of Sham Shui Po. The most the 15-year-old earned in a week was HK$25 (US$3.20) for 5kg.
The older child of a divorced 39-year-old cleaner, he prepares lunch for his 10-year-old sister and tutors her.
“When I think of how hard my mother works, I think it’s all right to help out a bit,” said Ming, who is in Secondary Three.
“There are people who ask, ‘Why are you gathering cardboard at such a young age?’ I think it’s OK to help my mother when she earns so little.”
Ming is among 274,900 Hong Kong children aged under 18 found living in poverty in 2020, according to this year’s Poverty Situation Report by the government.
The poverty rate of 23.6 per cent meant 1.65 million people, or more than one in five Hongkongers lived in poverty, a 12-year high.
The poverty line is drawn at 50 per cent of the median monthly household income in the city before taxation and government policy interventions, including welfare allowances for the elderly and poor families.
