The Latin American Foster Care Network continues to work towards regional integration. During the last week of August, Mara Tissera Luna and Claudia León from RELAF, together with Marion Prats from Unicef TACRO, carried out technical cooperation activities and the linguistic validation of the friendly versions of the Guidelines in English in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana.
To fulfil the planned agenda, a meeting was held with representatives of the Child Care and Protection Agency (CCPA, the childhood governmental body), its Director (Ann Greene), as well as the UNICEF Child Protection Specialist, Doris Roos, and representatives from the NGO Child Link. During this meeting, we made presentations about RELAF and its work in several countries and learnt about the current Guyanese context, in regard to alternative care.
In this Caribbean country, which was a British colony until 1966, there are around 850 children living in residential care facilities, and 133 living in foster care (while the total population of the country is of 800.000 inhabitants). In recent years, the local personnel succeeded in adapting their inherited colonial childhood legislation to the CRC, as well as the production of “Minimum Operational Standards” for children’s homes. Therefore, currently the care system is going through a transitional process, and the local professionals work to improve the policies and practices so that they are adjusted to a rights-based approach.
During the stay, we also visited public and private residential care institutions, and we carried out activities for the linguistic validation of the friendly versions of the Guidelines in English with governmental representatives and with 30 children that are being taken care of mainly in state-run institutions. Through these experiences, we were able to learn about the issues that affect children, such as the widespread use of corporal punishment as a means of discipline abd the lack of qualified staff, among others. We also got to know about the development of support programmes for families within their communities, in order to avoid family break-ups and separation.
During the second week of activities, Mara carried out field work for the production of the Study on Discrimination, which is being prepared by RELAF with the cooperation of UNICEF TACRO in the framework of the production for the Study on Institutionalised Childhood in the Americas by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and UNICEF. This consisted of interviews to chief personnel of the countries’ alternative care system (such as authorities of governmental bodies and NGOs), as well as interviews with the adolescents that live in residential care facilities and the staff that cares for them. It also involved visits to these institutions and the performing of observations and recordings in these settings.
While the work with the local authorities was very enriching, the knowledge of the violation of rights to which some institutionalised children are subjected was worrying. This is why we look forward to continuing collaborating with the local actors in order to improve the alternative care systems for Guyanese children and adolescents.
