Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

Leer este artículo en español.

In humanitarian situations and displacement settings, young children face multiple risks—including increased exposure to violence—that can deprive them of the nurturing care they need. These threats endanger their ability to reach their full potential and can negatively affect their development and well-being.

Drawing on insights from a previous Georgetown University Collaborative Insights report by Mara Tissera Luna, this blog examines early childhood development (ECD) and child protection (CP) in Guatemala. Despite notable progress in reducing child mortality and malnutrition, deep-rooted socioeconomic disparities, gender inequality, and political injustice continue to impact young children and their caregivers.

This Collaborative Insights report highlights insights proposed by community-based organizations (CBOs) to address these complex and interconnected challenges, which profoundly affect child development and protection. These recommendations focus on the obstacles children and their caregivers face, aiming to mitigate risks and help children survive and thrive.

Structural Inequalities and Conflicts Shaping ECD and CP in Guatemala

Let's start by exploring the current state of early childhood in Guatemala. With 18 million people, the largest country in Central America is known for its rich cultural, ethnic, and geographical diversity, along with abundant natural and human resources.

Yet despite these strengths, structural inequalities—socioeconomic, political, and gender-based—continue to impact young children and their caregivers, creating serious challenges for both child protection and development.

The numbers underscore these concerns: According to a UNICEF report, only half of children aged 24 to 59 months are on track with their health, learning, and psychosocial well-being. Meanwhile, the latest census indicates there are 2.3 million children aged 0 to 6, nearly half of whom—about one million—live in poverty, and over a third of whom—nearly 800,000—live in extreme poverty.

Adding to this broader context, structural violence, organized crime, the pursuit of educational and livelihood opportunities, and family reunification are key drivers of migration and displacement. Cultural attitudes that view migration as a path to upward mobility from an early age reinforce these patterns.

Existing Programs Share Common Challenges

Most programs—whether run by CBOs, national NGOs, or international NGOs—offer a broad range of ECD services in partnership with local government service providers, other CBOs, or non-governmental organizations.

Nearly all community-based programs in Guatemala employ a two-generation approach, combining ECD activities, such as home visits and positive parenting lessons, with CP initiatives, including mental health and psychosocial support. Many also provide caregiver-focused programs addressing livelihoods, economic development, literacy, reproductive health, gender-based violence, migration, and poverty alleviation.

Despite the positive strides made by these organizations, ECD programs continue to face several persistent challenges:

1. Lack of Integration Among ECD Programs

ECD initiatives are often scattered and operate in isolation, with minimal exchange of resources or lessons learned. This lack of coordination hampers their collective impact and limits the dissemination of best practices.

2. Limited Government Support

Sustaining ECD programs requires greater government involvement through dedicated funding and personnel. Without this, effective implementation remains challenging, especially at the municipal level.

3. Difficulty Engaging Caregivers

Several organizations identified a significant challenge in engaging caregivers in ECD programs. They identified a pressing need to educate caregivers and communities about the importance of early education, stimulation, and learning through play.

4. Socioeconomic Barriers

Nearly all organizations cited the precarious socioeconomic conditions of the families benefiting from the ECD programs as a significant obstacle to their participation in activities. Additionally, participants in peer–support groups, home visits, and positive parenting lessons are predominantly mothers, underscoring the need for broader family engagement.

5. Limited Access to Social Services

While ECD programs depend on families accessing additional social services, many families face significant obstacles, including limited transportation options and fear of racism or discrimination due to their Indigenous heritage or socioeconomic status.

Core Findings for INGOs and Donors

With a clearer understanding of the complex factors influencing ECD and CP in Guatemala, the focus now shifts to addressing these challenges effectively. The key insights gathered from CBOs can be grouped into three key areas:

• Strategies that support both children and their caregivers by addressing multifaceted needs, such as livelihoods, education, and well-being.

• Efforts to reduce disparities in knowledge creation by recognizing and valuing local expertise in shaping ECD programs.

• Partnerships and financial models that provide long-term, flexible support to ensure the continuity and effectiveness of ECD initiatives.

Social Justice in Whole-Family Approaches

Given the multiple challenges facing families and children, many interviewees from Guatemalan community-based organizations agreed that ECD and CP programs, policies, or interventions targeting Guatemalan children and their caregivers should be holistic. Their recommendations involve:

• Going beyond child-focused services to include caregiver well-being by promoting livelihoods, economic development, and social inclusion through whole-family approaches.
• Interviewees also highlighted the need for these initiatives to be grounded in gender justice and to foster children and youth's meaningful participation. These approaches can challenge harmful social norms, practices, and behaviors related to masculinity and rigid gender roles, which is particularly important given the significant caregiving responsibilities often assumed by women and youth, especially girls.
• The urgent need for a holistic approach is further underscored by the strong correlation between gender-based violence and child abuse. Many households experiencing partner violence also report incidents of child abuse, highlighting the necessity of addressing both issues simultaneously through integrated solutions.
• Many interviewees agreed that, given Guatemala's history of systemic racism against Indigenous populations, programs should engage the entire community and incorporate Indigenous and local knowledge. Understanding the historical root causes of inequality is essential to facilitating long-term systemic change.
• Several organizations also emphasized the significance of peer–support groups, awareness–raising, and community organizing, particularly in addressing socioeconomic and political issues and human rights violations that impact all community members.

Equity in Knowledge Creation

When it comes to democratizing knowledge production, valuing local knowledge and community-based practices takes center stage. CBOs possess unique insights into local realities and maintain close ties with the communities they serve.

To truly promote equality in knowledge creation—and empower these organizations to develop, systematize, and share their proven methodologies—funding becomes essential. This financial support would also enable the design and testing of educational materials focused on early childhood development for young caregivers and educators.

But funding isn't everything. Just as important, INGOs and donors must legitimize these organizations as knowledge creators. Recognizing their deep expertise and strong community connections ensures their contributions are properly credited and valued.

Many interviewees highlighted that preexisting local knowledge and methods should inform international aid agencies' decision-making processes. Rather than relying on international agendas applied uniformly, aid efforts should be guided by locally driven evaluations and needs assessments. This approach ensures that solutions genuinely address young children's and their families' unique needs within their specific sociocultural contexts.

International Cooperation and Funding

To support holistic approaches and the development of localized and community-based solutions, national and international funding must increase and be structured more effectively. Addressing these complex challenges requires a shift in how that funding is allocated and managed.

Below are some crucial areas that can drive significant improvements:

The Need for Increased Funding and Disaggregated Data

One of Guatemala's key challenges is the lack of robust data collection systems to accurately assess ECD needs across its diverse regions. Additionally, reporting systems are necessary to track how international donor funds are allocated. This mirrors a global issue—there's still no standardized method for monitoring donor commitments to early childhood programs in humanitarian contexts.

A Growing Call for Localizing Funding

To better support locally led ECD and child protection programs, it's crucial to increase direct funding for community-based organizations, local nonprofits, and grassroots entities. This approach bypasses intermediary agencies, ensuring that resources reach those who best understand local needs, improving program relevance, continuity, and sustainability.

CBOs Emphasize the Need for Long-Term, Flexible Funding

Unlike rigid, short-term grants, flexible funding allows organizations to adapt to their communities' evolving priorities and implement culturally appropriate solutions. As one CBO leader explained, "Flexible funding reflects trust in local leadership. It's about supporting local priorities, not just ticking boxes for funders."

Simplifying Complex Application Processes

Many grassroots organizations struggle with lengthy, bureaucratic application processes that require specialized expertise, creating an uneven playing field where only larger, well-resourced organizations can compete. By simplifying administrative requirements and offering more accessible funding models, donors can foster genuine partnerships and empower local organizations to lead.

What the Future Holds

We’ve seen how addressing the complex challenges of early childhood development and child protection in Guatemala requires a collaborative, integral, and holistic approach. By increasing flexible funding, fostering community-led initiatives, and prioritizing local knowledge, INGOs, donors, and governments can develop sustainable, culturally tailored solutions that truly meet the needs of young children and their caregivers.

Learn more about approaches to early childhood development, protection, and localization by diving deeper into the full report.

Mara Tissera Luna is a 2024-2025 collaborative fellow at Georgetown's Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues. She was previously the program manager for the Breakthrough Series Collaborative on Promoting Early Childhood Development (ECD) for Young Children on the Move in Northern Central America, an effort funded by the Bainum Foundation to learn from innovative community-based responses to address the ECD and protection needs of young children experiencing displacement in Guatemala. ​

The Breakthrough Series Collaborative on Promoting Early Childhood Development for Young Children on the Move in Northern Central America is an effort to learn from local leaders who have been innovating community-based responses to address the early childhood development (ECD) and protection needs of children aged 0 to 6 on the move and in displacement settings in northern Central America.

Context and Challenges

The Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues at Georgetown University brings together practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and other stakeholders to reflect on and find solutions to pressing questions related to global children's issues, including child protection and early childhood development for children on the move in the Americas.

The Collaborative on Global Children's Issues is:

• committed to creating opportunities that are child-centered;

• grounded in the lived experiences of children, their families, and communities;

• responsive to current and emerging needs and useful to actors working in a variety of contexts and capacities to meet them;

• evidence-informed and solutions-oriented; and

• building effective bridges between stakeholders involved in practice, policy, and research.

In Guatemala, children and their caregivers face severe impacts from entrenched socioeconomic and political injustice, with intertwined and emerging consequences. Due to its location in the Dry Corridor of Central America, the country faces the impacts of climate change, including food insecurity, particularly in its western regions. Guatemala is also prone to tropical storms, droughts, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Additionally, the country has long grappled with violent land conflict (albeit recent progress), worsening levels of social conflict, structural racism, and state capture by political, military, and economic elites, which have long maintained their privileges at the expense of Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples. Violence, organized crime, the lack of educational and livelihood opportunities, and family reunification drive migration from mainly the western, predominantly Indigenous regions of the country to the United States. 

Despite affecting hundreds of thousands of children, the internal displacement of Guatemalans, the disruption of family structures and community identity due to mass migration, and the reintegration challenges facing returnees have received less international attention compared to situations affecting people in transit or Guatemalans arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Developing child-sensitive, protection-focused, human rights-based, humane, regional migration policies is critical to protecting people within large-scale displacement across Latin America and the Caribbean. Likewise, the U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America marked substantial progress in U.S. cooperation towards the Northern Triangle because its integral approach focuses on the complex structural causes behind migration and emphasizes job creation, economic investment, rule of law, and human rights. For instance, in 2022 in Honduras and Guatemala, USAID’s interventions to combat malnutrition and improve child survival reached about 175,000 children under 5, while 30,000 gender-based violence survivors received services through USAID programs. However, while addressing the needs of individuals and families moving within the Northern Triangle of Central America — which saw a 200% rise increase in 2023 — and those of Guatemala attempting to migrate to the United States, it is essential to prioritize the protection of and support for Guatemalan internally displaced and returnee children and their caregivers. 

Focus Areas

Our goal is to learn from community-based organizations that support and advocate for the rights of displaced and returned Guatemalan children aged 0 to 6 years and their caregivers. These organizations, present in the City of Guatemala and its outskirts, Quetzaltenango (Xela) and Huehuetenango, offer integrated services and advocate for the rights of young children and their families, including those displaced due to gender-based violence, at risk of being displaced, or who face challenges to reintegrate after being returned from the United States or Mexico.

Preliminary Insights and Findings

Thirty-one in-person and 11 online interviews with selected international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), donors, community-based organizations, and government agencies helped us learn what works to support early childhood development (ECD) and violence prevention for displaced Guatemalan families with young children aged 0 to 6.

From the baseline assessment and country visit, several key insights emerged:

• Approaches to Early Childhood Development: All the programs visited strive to employ a “whole family” or “two-generation” approach. They integrate early childhood development and violence prevention with livelihoods, local development, psycho-social support, or poverty alleviation programs for their caregivers, often women and adolescent-headed households. This is particularly significant in Guatemala as nearly 70,000 children aged 10 to 17 were married or in unions, and over 62,000 girls and women aged 10 to 19 registered births in 2023. 

• Early Childhood Development as a relatively nascent policy issue: Early childhood development has recently become a significant policy issue in Guatemala. The first government's 10-year Integrated Early Childhood Development cross-sector national plan was approved in 2010.

• Opportunities ahead: There is a current window of opportunity with the impending approval of a new 20-year early childhood development plan. The newly elected Partido Semilla administration is keen to advance social policy areas related to early childhood. Additionally, the country recently approved its first-ever migration policy. This policy establishes the child’s best interest, the differentiated age, gender, and diversity approach (i.e., considering the unique needs of marginalized migrant groups, including those with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, girls, and the LGBTQI+ community), and preserving family unity or reunification as its cross-cutting, overarching principles. It also identifies girls, boys, and adolescents—especially those who are unaccompanied or separated—family units on the move with children, and pregnant and lactating women as priority groups in policy and support services. Additionally, it assigns specific objectives and government entities responsible for ensuring their rights.

• Operational environment: The community-based organizations interviewed are overstretched, understaffed, and underfunded. They require direct and flexible funding, technical cooperation and/or capacity-building for institutional development, and connections with donors in the Global North. Some community-based organizations need funding to systematize and publish their proven methodologies, including versions in Indigenous languages.

• Advocating for localization of funding: There is a need to increase direct funding to community-based and grassroots organizations via long-term, flexible grants to guarantee the continuity and sustainability of programs. Announced by USAID Administrator Samantha Power in November 2021 at Georgetown University, the Centroamérica Local initiative could represent a major leap toward supporting local organizations. This five-year initiative is backed by a $300 million budget and seeks to directly support local organizations addressing the causes of irregular migration to the United States, prioritizing those led by indigenous groups and women. In Guatemala, this approach has directly engaged eight Guatemalan national partners, including the children’s rights national non-governmental organization El Refugio de la Niñez, which implements actions for the reception, reunification, and reintegration of returned children and their families. For its part, USAID/IOM’s Addressing the Root Causes of Irregular Migration Project, partly targeting indigenous women and girls, awarded 47 sub-grants to address migration drivers in 15 Guatemalan departments.

Looking Forward

Based on the findings from the needs assessment, in the upcoming months, we will organize two online forums involving community-based organizations, Guatemalan government representatives, USAID, foundations, and other donors. These aim to 1) foster an environment of open dialogue, knowledge-sharing, and learning on what works to protect young children on the move; and 2) identify effective strategies to support early childhood development and the protection of young children on the move that prioritize grassroots and community organizations.

Acknowledgments

We extend our heartfelt thanks to the national non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, grassroots, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and government entities that generously shared their time and insights: 

• Asociación Dejando Una Sonrisa (ADUS)

• Asociación Futuro Vivo

• Asociación Puerta de Esperanza (part of Proyecto Prevenir)

• Casa del Migrante (Red de Casas del Migrante Scalabrini)

• Catholic Relief Services Quetzaltenango

• ChildFund Quetzaltenango

• ChildFund Regional Office

• Children’s Emergency Relief International (CERI)

• Church World Service (CWS)

• Coordinadora Institucional de Promoción por los Derechos de la Niñez (CIPRODENI) 

• Coincidir – Por y con la niñéz, adolescencia y juventud

• Colectivo Vida Digna

• El Refugio de la Niñez

• Escuela de la Calle

• Fundación Sobrevivientes

• Global Fund for Children

• HIAS in Guatemala

• International Rescue Committee (IRC)

• Jóvenes por el Cambio (JXC)

• KIND (Kids in Need of Defense)

• Migration program and Early Childhood Program of Pastoral de Movilidad Humana de la Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (PMH CEG)

• Monseñor Alvaro Ramazzini (Pastoral PMH CEG Huehuetenango)

• Nuevos Horizontes

• Programa de Atención, Movilización e Incidencia por la Niñez y Adolescencia (PAMI)

• Pop No'j in Guatemala City and Colotenango

• Proyecto de Desarrollo Santiago (PRODESSA)

• Red Jesuita con Migrantes de Guatemala

• Search for Common Ground

• The Guatemalan Institute of Migration

• The Migrant Support Center of the Municipality of Malacatancito (Huehuetenango)

• The Ministry of Health and Social Policy

• The Secretary of Social Welfare of the Presidency (SBS)

• Tierra Nueva

• UNHCR/Tierra Nueva/IRC/Refugio de la Niñez's Migrants and Refugees Assistance Center (CAPMiR) in Huehuetenango

• UNICEF Guatemala CO and UNICEF HQ

This collaborative project is funded by the Bainum Family Foundation's Global Education Fund (GEF), which seeks to increase equity in access to quality early care and education for young children worldwide by supporting and learning from local community-led projects serving children and families. The goal is to share knowledge and innovation through co-creation.

For previous analysis of children on the move in the Northern Triangle-Mexico-U.S. corridor and policy responses, see the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues’ series “Innovating Protection for Children Along the Migratory Route and at the U.S.-Mexico Border.”

Mara Tissera Luna is a program manager at the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues, where she leads the Breakthrough Series Collaborative on Promoting Early Childhood Development for Young Children on the Move in Northern Central America.