Food banks help fight child poverty in deprived areas of UK

The West Midlands, a region including England's second city Birmingham, ranks as one of the most deprived areas of the UK.

In this Thursday's parliamentary election, the increased cost of living is at the top of most voters' minds, especially here. Rising energy and food costs stemming from years of economic instability and high inflation are affecting a large part of the population.

Birmingham has one of the highest child poverty levels in the country. Across the UK, over 4 million children are living in poverty, or what the government calls relative low-income households. In Birmingham 46 percent of children are classified in this category.

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‌"Speaking about Birmingham, the cost of living crises, a lot of social economic challenges have forced children onto harder paths,"says Henri-Paul Eitokpah. He's director of operations at Inner City Life, which provides a weekly food bank service and has just opened a charity shop providing furniture, clothing and children's toys at discounted prices.

"You see a lot of children dealing with hunger belonging to families or single parents and some who are homeless as well," he says. ‌"These are all perfect recipes for a bad childhood, and what we try to do as a charity is ensure we cater to the needs of young children struggling to find a way, struggling to find food and just basic sustenance."

In the middle of a housing estate in Wolverhampton, a nearby city of 250,000 people, is the Wolverhampton Muslim Forum. Started as a charity to provide aid to flood victims in Pakistan in 2010, it has now found critical needs unmet much closer to home. The forum started providing food parcels during the COVID pandemic and hasn't stopped.

"The cost of living is causing a huge problem," says the forum's chairman, Mohammad Khalil.

"We held some meetings with the (local) councillors, and we also invited the mayor of Wolverhampton, and actually they said 'Look, we need to keep running this, because it's much required.'"

Khalil's wife Taiba Begum manages the food bank and its team of volunteers.

‌"Sometimes even before we've got here, there's a queue out there," she says, pointing outside. "We have about 60 to 70 families and by 12.30 the queue is going all the way around (the building). There are families, there are singles… it's not just Muslims that we cater for, we cater for whites, blacks, all Asians, anybody who comes to us who is in need of food, basically."

With the election just days away, the couple are hoping whoever forms the next government will seriously tackle the issues they are helping with every day and find new ways of bringing hope as well as practical solutions to those most in need.

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