Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

Children and families continue to experience displacement across the Northern Triangle of Central America in record numbers.

Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala exhibit complex mixed movements as countries of origin, transit, destination, and return. At times, families find themselves displaced within their own nations or neighboring ones, driven by factors such as violence, climate change-induced environmental degradation, food insecurity, or economic necessity. Others are moving within mixed migration movements from South America and the Caribbean towards the U.S.-Mexico border. In many cases, children and families try to reintegrate into their countries of origin after being returned from Mexico or the United States.

Regardless of their unique migration experiences, these children and families share a heightened vulnerability to various human rights violations along their migration journeys, including abuse by police forces or criminal groups, exploitation, detention, gender-based violence, physical hardship, and discrimination. Many suffer psychological distress or trauma from their journey, having faced harrowing experiences crossing the Darien Gap, the U.S.-Mexico border, or both.

International child rights law underscores that all children have a right to safety and to access protection and education regardless of their migration status. In Latin America, national and local governments bear the duty to safeguard the rights of children and families on the move, irrespective of their origin or destination. However, child welfare, education, and protection systems –already fragile prior to the COVID-19 pandemic–have been overwhelmed and unable to respond to the scale of needs. While national civil society organizations and community-based initiatives are crucial for establishing and maintaining protective environments for these children, they are frequently underfunded, understaffed, and stretched beyond their capacities. In the midst of such tremendous challenges and constraints, extraordinary leaders are innovating solutions to complex issues affecting children on the move, often with little support or infrastructure to coordinate programs, influence policies, and measure results.

Against this backdrop, our team has begun to design a Breakthrough Series Collaborative on Promoting Early Childhood Development for Young Children on the Move in Northern Central America. The project aims to identify and learn from community-based and small national organizations engaged in policy efforts or working within education, social service, child welfare, or protection sectors and leading innovative efforts to promote early childhood development and protection for young children displaced and on the move in northern Central America. This breakthrough series collaborative ultimately seeks to learn from innovators who are using multisystem and multidisciplinary approaches to improve policies, programs, and practices that facilitate early childhood development and protection outcomes for children on the move. The program aims to build and share current and future leaders’ knowledge and capacity, cultivate their leadership skills, improve the operation of their programs, and create a mutually supportive network of individuals committed to improving systems and responses to young children on the move.

In the upcoming months, site visits in the Northern Triangle of Central America and a scoping exercise will allow us to identify already-existing initiatives to promote early child development and protection for young children on the move, potential project partners, and locations for future programs. 

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 around the world. They do so by supporting and learning from local community-led projects serving children and families, with the goal of sharing 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.

There is global agreement illustrated by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely adopted human rights treaty in the world, that optimal support for a child comes from a caring and protective family. In addition, Catholic social teaching, outlined in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, seeks the whole development of the child within a family setting, affirming God’s plan for family to be a child’s most important source of love, emotional support, and spiritual guidance. Yet, when vulnerable parents and families do not have the resources to meet their basic needs, or are otherwise unable to access fundamental protections, the risk of child-family separation increases.

Millions of children across the world live in residential care settings, often known as orphanages. More than 80 percent of children living in such environments have at least one living parent, with poverty being the primary reason vulnerable children are placed in care. Decades of research have shown that children’s well-being is seriously impacted by lack of family care. Family separation, combined with the inappropriate use of alternative care, including orphanages and residential institutions, can lead to immediate and long-term physical, social, psychological, and emotional harm. Children in such circumstances often experience abuse, neglect, lack of stimulation, and extreme and toxic stress, all of which have a profoundly negative effect on a child’s development and adult outcomes.

For this topic, the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues asks: What is the Catholic Church’s history regarding orphanages and children’s residential care facilities? How have the practices of Christian faith communities changed over time and in response to growing evidence about better care alternatives for children? What does answering God’s call to care for the orphan mean for churches, families, orphanages, and other forms of children’s care today and in the future?