Why is Telefónica focusing on education in Latin America?
Dropping out from school is one of the biggest obstacles to economic development in Latin America, increasing social inequalities. It is calculated that 5.1 million children are working in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, missing out on development opportunities. Within this context, Proniño's interventions are based on the central concept that "education is an effective tool for the progressive eradication of child labour”.
In principle, children need to be given the basic personal conditions to successfully follow the educational system, from being provided with basic materials to ensuring that their health and nutrition allow them to learn.
The relationships between the child, family and school:
The family is also a part of the educational process, and must make a commitment to sustainable education. In so doing, the family itself begins to transform: recognising children's rights, reflecting on affective relationships and good treatment, re-assessing the concept of study and therefore removing work as the central focus of a child's life.
Intervention is also carried out in terms of the child-school relationship (1). We seek to compensate for the accumulated shortcomings suffered by children in relation to study, as well as try and adapt the educational environment to various learning needs. The school itself is used as a platform for creating a new child-family-school relationship. Finally, when the intervention has attained a certain amount of continuity and scale, it becomes socially and institutionally visible, and it is thus possible to create various types of containment networks, expanding the protection of children.
This accumulated cascade of change makes it possible to create a new social, family, school and institutional environment enabling the progressive eradication of child labour. And even in those cases where it is not possible to get children out of work, keeping them within the formal educational loop leads, in the medium-long term, to improved possibilities of social inclusion and job opportunities, so that when they reach adulthood they avoid repeating the vicious circle of poverty and more child labour.
(1) This issue is being extensively discussed by specialist institutions, experts and educational leaders in Latin America. By way of example, see “Equidad educativa y desigualdad Social” (Educational equity and social inequality), by Néstor López, IIPE-UNESCO, Buenos Aires Regional Office.
Effective education:
So that the process described above can function effectively, it is necessary for certain minimum conditions to be met:
- Education must be sustained and sustainable. Sustained because it must be carried out over time to enable the process of changing children and their environment to take hold and consolidate. Sustainable because it is necessary to provide guarantees that inserting or keeping children in the formal educational system does not depend only on factors external to the education system itself.
- The education provided to a child at school must meet minimum quality and excellence criteria to ensure real possibilities of continuing studies or vocational training, allowing decent access to the world of work. Otherwise it would only be a matter of delaying exclusion and child and adolescent labour. In other words, it is clear that the better the education on offer, the more effective the eradication strategy and the greater the opportunities of social and workplace inclusion.