The Bernard van Leer Foundation in Mexico
We have worked in Mexico for almost 30 years. We decided that our focus for the coming years should be on young children affected by migration for two main reasons. First, the numbers of children being affected by migration in Mexico is growing and will continue to grow. Second, there is only very limited support for young children of migrants. What support exists tends to be aimed at children of primary school age and above. Programmes for young children, meanwhile, tend to focus on communities in rural areas – in other words, the areas where many migrants come from, but not where they go to.
There are many different reasons for migration in Mexico. The four locations where we have chosen to focus our support represent some of the main types of migration. These are Ciudad Juarez, on the Texan border, where young mothers migrate to work long hours in factories; Soconusco, at the other end of the country, where migrants from Central American countries can be found living in conditions of extreme poverty; the state of Sinaloa, where agricultural workers migrate seasonally in conditions of extraordinary hardship; and San Cristóbal de Las Casas, where indigenous families displaced by rural conflict and economic need encounter a new and hostile urban environment.
Whatever the circumstances of migration, it affects young children in broadly similar ways. They lack safe places to play and rest, a problem compounded when their parents work long hours, leaving them on their own or in the care of other children. Their parents find that institutions such as pre-schools and clinics are difficult to access, for reasons including language barriers, complicated and inflexible bureaucracy, and discriminatory attitudes on the part of some individuals among the local populations. And they have not been seen as an important enough constituency to attract much attention from legislators or generate sustained political will behind efforts to improve their situations.
The programme will work principally with partners in civil society, but also in close collaboration with government and academia. About two-thirds of our support goes to partners that work with the young children of migrants in the four locations, experimenting with different ways of creating “safe spaces” for these children in the community and in institutions such as pre-schools and childcare centres. Because we carefully chose our four locations to be paradigmatic, we expect that they will help create broad visibility for the problems faced by young migrant children and that the ways in which our partners work here will have broad relevance elsewhere in the country and region.
The remaining third of our support goes towards documentation, research and advocacy. We will support our partners to disseminate what they learn to public sector agencies, NGOs and international organisations who have the ability to adopt, expand and sustain demonstrably successful models of intervention. And we will work with a network of journalists as well as with civil society organisations to draw attention to the rights of young migrant children, and advocate for more public investment in appropriate and inclusive programmes and services.
