Fundación Telefónica

• The Proniño programme aims to make a significant contribution to the eradication of child labour in Latin America through high quality, sustained and sustainable schooling.

• Comprehensive protection: This involves implementing projects through different social organisations involved in the programme in order to remove children from child labour and give them back the rights which have been violated.
• Educational quality: The goal is to strengthen educational and learning processes for children involved in the project through educational methodologies which, among other things, include ICT, building a life project and developing schools into social spaces for the prevention and eradication of child labour.
• Social and institutional strengthening: The objective is to raise awareness of the problem of child labour, creating and communicating knowledge about this issue; strengthening the parties involved in the programme; and creating a network of actors and institutions which, through inter-sectoral cooperation (public and private), can make the intervention sustainable in order to resolve this problem.

According to the ILO global report “The elimination of child labour: an objective within our reach” (2006) there are currently some 5.7 million children working in Latin America who are below the minimum age to work, which is 5.1% of the total number of children in the region.

Whilst some progress has been made over recent years and the number of working children has fallen by 20 million - particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean - the problem of child labour is still widespread. And not only is it persisting but, as a result of the present worldwide economic crisis, it may worsen and some of the recent progress may be reversed.

The concern of society and governments for this problem has resulted in policies being implemented to rescue these working children. One of the programmes to help resolve this problem is Fundación Telefónica's Proniño programme for the protection of the rights of children.

The Proniño programme is making a significant contribution to the ILO's goal - to eradicate the worst forms of child labour in the area before 2015, and to eliminate all child labour before 2020 – by transforming those with the most influence on children who are at risk of dropping out of education.

Proniño - one of the Social Programmes for Children - is one of Telefónica's social action programmes, which has been managed since 2005 by Fundación Telefónica, together with local Telefónica operators in 13 Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela; it is currently the largest initiative by a private company to contribute to the eradication of child labour which violates the rights of children.

The Proniño programme is made possible by the coordinated work of a number of parties. Firstly, Telefónica which is responsible for financing and promoting the programme as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility policy. Secondly, Fundación Telefónica, which defines the strategic plan, manages the regional processes and establishes agreements with other bodies to strengthen the programme, and which uses its subsidiaries in Latin American to select and coordinate NGOs to manage the programme. The 108 NGOs which currently implement the programme, and the more than 5,000 professionals from a wide range of disciplines who are working on the programme, all deserve special mention. This network is completed by the active participation of 4,092 schools and 607 care centres (a total of 4,699 schools) which implement the programme.