Participation of RELAF in the “Workshop for the preparation of the guidelines of the Foster Care Programme” in Lima, Peru

RELAF participated in the “Workshop for the preparation of the guidelines of the Foster Care Program”. This workshop was established with the general purpose of promoting the right to community- and family-based care and the specific and immediate purpose of instituting the foster care practice as a public policy of the Peruvian state. It was a multi-sectorial activity that brought together cooperation from important actors involved in the protection of the rights of the children deprived of parental care or at risk of losing it. The commission working on the guidelines is made up of representatives of the Programa Integral Nacional para el Bienestar Familiar-INABIF (National Integral Programme for Family Well-Being); of the Dirección de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes- DINNA (Board of Children and Adolescents); of the UGPI; of the Ministerio de la Mujer y Desarrollo Social-MIMDES (Ministry of Women and Social Development); of the children’s institution “Nuevo Futuro Perú”; of the Organization “Amor y Ley”; and of Bucker Peru, which is the promoter of the commission together with UNICEF.

The representatives are currently putting a great deal of work into the preparation of a document of guidelines for the foster care programme, which will be their first product as a group.

RELAF participated in the first meeting of the working commission and contributed with its view that it is necessary to establish an integral protection system that avoids separation of the children from their families of origin and provides them with family-based alternative care that is adequate to a human rights approach or with residential care for those children that require it due to their particular situation.

In this sense, RELAF stressed the necessity of the commission to set itself as a sphere of permanent work that progressively involves all the actors related to the general subject that brings them together and that goes beyond the thematic frontier of foster care. All of this, in order to strengthen the practices and public policies that guarantee the right to community- and family-based care.

RELAF also provided the commission with specific knowledge about human rights approach in relation to the processes of foster care and its phases, knowledge that will be incorporated in the Guidelines that the commission is currently preparing.

The Network supports and encourages this initiative to move forward and sets itself as a permanent sphere of dialogue and collective, multi-sectorial, democratic construction. The situation of childhood in Peru requires it.