People on the Move in Latin America: Key Factors, Data and Education as an Effective Response

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Related to CIES 2024 sub-theme Curriculum and Protest, this panel explores educational programs, research, and monitoring initiatives as modalities to shift cultures of education’s institutions from homogenous systems to more inclusive and diverse systems. Through different presentations, panelists will demonstrate ways in which education can be a catalyst for change and collective action that can respond to the learning crisis and that can reduce children and adolescents´ need to migrate due to structural poverty, violence and lack of opportunities in the Latin American region.

This panel aims to share information about the prolonged educational crisis that many children and adolescents experience as they are forced or find themselves in the need to leave their countries due to national political, economic and social crisis, structural poverty and extreme violence, and in some cases, as a consequence of the impact of climate change on the places that they inhabit or on their subsistence activities, such as agriculture. Also, panelists find essential to raise awareness about these new trend of people’s mobilization across the region and their associated factors, which according to regional and global experts, is no longer a trend but a new reality that requires immediate responses to guarantee the rights of the migrant population who already face discrimination, xenophobia and the denial of basic services such as health and education services by destination or hosting countries that are not prepared to receive and respond to this new context.

The panel will be divided into four parts. First, panelists will introduce the participants to the migration crisis in the Latin American region and the deep impact it is having on the access to education among children and adolescents. Second, panelists will reflect on how "people on the move" acknowledges the diverse experiences, motivations, legal statuses, scale, and composition, what are some of the most common patterns of mobilization, and the importance of counting on a regional monitoring framework that can help stakeholders design and provide the most effective responses. Third, panelists will present the results of a research study in Honduras that aims to provide information on how one of their programs is contributing to rootedness and to reduce outward migration by identifying and addressing the factors that motivate people to leave their country, as well as how education contributes to keeping students and families in their communities. Finally, panelists will showcase some of the educational responses that they have provided to guarantee that people on the move get equal access to quality and inclusive education in most affected countries in the region by featuring the case of an accelerated educational program in Colombia.

After the presentations, panelists expect to have the opportunity to interact with the participants to learn from other experiences in the region. We will close the panel with a final reflection on the urgency to count on a regional response that could hold accountable governments about the measures that they are putting in place to guarantee the right to education of people on the move.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Mariana Cruz, Education Development Center

Individual Presentations

• Educational situation of youth on the move in Latin America - Florencia Saffirio

• How Education can Contribute to Rootedness and Mitigate Irregular Migration: a Study from Rural Honduras - Jennifer Mallman, Catholic Relief Services CRS

Discussant

• Arlene Benitez, Catholic Relief Services