Regions: Africa   Asia   Latin America


Name of Organization: Fundación Junto Con Los Niños (JUCONI)

Country: Ecuador

Project Title: "Apoyando a Familias como Agentes de Cambio – Proyecto para Promover el aceso sostenible de los Niños de la Calle a la Escuela Formal" ("Empowering Families as Agents of Change - Project for Ensuring Street Working Children Have Sustained Access to Mainstream Education")

Project Timeframe: 12 months (Starting May 9, 2005)

Location of Project: Guayaquil, Guayas

Budget Amount: $10,000

NGO contact and website:
Av. Carlos Julio Arosemena Km 2.5, Detrás del edificio Orquifa
Guayaquil, Guayas, Ecuador – Casilla Postal 09062203
Phone: +593 4 220 8093/8095
E-mail: sreyes@juconi.org.ec

Project's Primary Objective: Raise awareness of the importance of education for all children, and mobilize a wide array of actors to improve and expand education infrastructures.

Description of Organization: JUCONI Ecuador was founded in 1995 under the auspices of International Children's Trust, building on lessons learned from Mexico. Its key institutional objective is to design and offer services that secure family and social reintegration for children who work on the street or who are at high risk of taking to the street.

JUCONI has developed a method based on personalized attention given to the family context at home to assure not only that they can abandon street work but also that families don't enforce children to go to the streets as an economic solution to poverty. Moreover, this strategy promotes changes to the conditions that push children to work on the streets, such as family violence. JUCONI helps to assure children's opportunities to develop their potential and to fully participate in society.

JUCONI is based on an eco-systemic approach that takes into account children's schools, their teachers, their friends, their neighbors and their community in general. A special focus is given to teachers as key actors to children's success; this is facilitated through training, follow up, and the support of excluded children. In this process, teachers learn the individual situation of the children and strategies to support children with special needs, receive support from the child's family, and recognition their special role in the scholastic success of former child laborers.

Description of Project funded by CIRCLE: The project aims to work with children who work on the city streets, often from as young as four-years-old and for very long hours until late at night, usually unsupervised. These children are exposed on a daily basis to violence, drugs and crime. Girls are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse and prostitution. The extreme dangers they face whilst on the streets, including the increasing presence of criminal gangs, means that these children are certainly undertaking one of the worst forms of work (ref ILO Convention 182). JUCONI´s strategy is to empower 20 street-working and 20 high risk children living in extreme economic and social disadvantage for sustained school access and success; develop its family-based work; evaluate project results to ensure ongoing improvements in services for all children; and share identified best practice with other government and CSO practitioners working nationally, regionally and internationally, thus contributing to joint efforts to strengthen strategies for eliminating child labour and securing school access, attendance and progress for the most marginalized children.

Project Targets (Common Indicators):
Enrollment: 40 children
Persistence: 100%
Transition: 100%
Completion: 90%