Our activities in Latin America

More than half of the 400 million Latin Americans can not meet their basic needs and there are 102 million poor people who can not even feed their children. With the poor ever poorer, the rich ever richer and a middle class in the process of disappearing, a new misery is taking possession of Latin America in order to turn it into one of the most unequal regions in the world. One out of three children is hungry and 60% of the people are poor in this region, which, paradoxically, has an enormous capacity for food production. At traffic lights or at the doors of restaurants, alone or in groups, begging or asking for sweets, children swarm the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Bogota and Mexico City, where they spend their days looking for something to eat.

Currently, approximately 40 million children live or work in the streets of Latin America, as reported by the non-governmental organization Casa Alliance. In Central America, for example, more than 2 and a half million children are employed in the labor market.

The number of minors working "coincides with the number of adults who are unemployed and this is a paradox: on the one hand adults seeking employment and not finding a job, on the other hand “boys and girls who should stay in school and are working", comments with a tone of disappointment Guillermo Dema, an Italian representative of the International Labor Organization (ILO).

And the children repeat the models and examples set by their relatives, many of whom use the "street" as a means of livelihood. The ‘cartonero’ is a new actor in urban life, both in the center and in the south of the continent, albeit with different characteristics. In Central America this is what they call people who sleep on the street covered with cardboard, while in South America the term is referred to those who collect recyclable rubbish and cartons for later resale. (Source: WB, IDB and ECLAC AFP trad. Chicas Committee Turin)

Faced with this scenario, Dokita’s main effort in South America centers on investing in children. We are present in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Peru by supporting projects and facilities which promote the reintegration and education of children at high social risk (street children and adolescents with neither an education or a job).