LONDON: Candidates in this week’s London elections are urging local councils to engage Muslim communities and address growing wealth divides leading Muslim children into poverty faster than any other group.
Londoners will go to the polls on Thursday in the wake of a damning indictment from Human Rights Watch claiming that at 37 percent, the city has the UK’s highest rates of child poverty.
But for Muslim children it has reached 50 percent, a figure that does not surprise Mustafa Field, director of the Faiths Forum for London.
“Poorer communities tend to have weaker infrastructure, which includes access to good-quality food and nutritional meals,” he told Arab News.
“I don’t work on the frontline, but I’ve received direct requests from struggling families for food in the wake of the pandemic, which has been a very alarming development in the level of poverty within London’s Muslim communities.”
Field said candidates can alleviate worsening poverty rates by…