Global IssuesCHILE: Eliminating Slums
Chile, touted as Latin America's great economic success story, has gone a long way towards reducing poverty and eliminating the country's slums. But a new study shows that disadvantages are still faced by 50,000 children living in shantytowns.
According to the records kept by the Fundación Un Techo para Chile (A Roof for Chile Foundation), a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1997 by Jesuit priest Felipe Berríos, there are currently just over 20,000 families living in slums, often without basic services, in this country of nearly 17 million people.
That is down from 29,000 families in 2007 and 126,000 families in 1997.
And official figures indicate that the poverty rate was reduced from 38 to 13 percent between 1990 and 2006.
The main aim of A Roof for Chile is to 'structurally' eradicate slums by Sept. 18, 2010, the 200th anniversary of Chile's independence from Spain - meaning that only a tiny proportion of families would still be living in shantytowns, but with concrete plans to move into decent housing.
'We have public policies implemented by the Housing Ministry with really good subsidies; organised groups of people; businesspeople who want to cooperate; and A Roof for Chile with young hard-working volunteers,' Father Berríos told IPS.
'But obviously if all of this isn't given a boost, and isn't treated with the necessary urgency, it can continue to be put off, because it's always tempting to postpone things till the next (presidential) elections,' he said.
Chileans will elect a new president in the Jan. 17 runoff. The two candidates are right-wing business tycoon Sebastián Piñera and former Christian Democrat president Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), who represents the centre-left 'Concertación' or Coalition for Democracy, which has been in power for two decades.
'In the highly developed state that Chile is in right now, with a very high per capita GDP, and now a member of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), it is not acceptable for there to be slums anymore, with poor people and adolescents who are 10 times more likely to fail a grade in school because they live in slums,' UNICEF (U.N. Children's Fund) representative in Chile Gary Stahl commented to IPS.
'These pockets of poverty shouldn't still exist while the rest of the country advances,' he said. 'Chile now has every chance, everything it needs, to offer the same opportunities to all of the country's children and adolescents.'
In Stahl's view, the country 'has made great progress at the national level, and has excellent indicators in comparison to the rest of Latin America and the entire world, but now it has to start seeing things from a more regional, and collective, perspective.'
The government of incumbent socialist President Michelle Bachelet announced that on Jan. 11 Chile will officially join the OECD, known as the rich countries' club.
Chile will become the second Latin American member of the OECD, which was established in 1961 to promote economic and social welfare among member countries by assisting them in the formulation and coordination of policy and to promote their support of developing nations. (Mexico joined in 1994.)
'Modestly speaking, I believe that we are at a quite advanced level, and that we will become the first Latin American country to put an end to slums,' Berríos told IPS.
'However, that must not lull us into resting on our laurels, but should push us to work harder, to set an example for the rest of Latin America,' he said.
A new study by A Roof for Chile and UNICEF, 'Vivir en campamentos: la voz de los niños' ('Living in Slums: The Voice of the Children'), presented Wednesday, found that half of the 10 to 13-year-olds who were interviewed had flunked a grade.
And although 90 percent said they were still in school, one-third said they had worked as bag boys in supermarkets, street hawkers, waste pickers or car washers, for example.
While the drop-out rate in Chile is just 0.93 percent for primary school and 6.8 percent for secondary school, 13.3 percent of the youngsters surveyed for the study had quit school.
The field work for the study, carried out by the Catholic University's Department of Sociology, included interviews with 1,280 children, teenagers and adults in slums in three regions: the Santiago Metropolitan region, the northern region of Antofagasta and the central region of Bío-Bío.
The report urges the presidential candidates to address the fact that 50,000 children and adolescents in Chile are still living in shantytowns.
The study found that around 30 percent of children in the slums share a bed with someone: 65.2 percent of them with a brother or sister. But 20 percent share a bed with someone other than their siblings or parents.
More than 60 percent of the respondents said they had other relatives - besides their immediate family - living in the slums.
Although nearly 70 percent of the children said they liked living in their neighbourhoods, 77 percent also said they would actually prefer to live elsewhere.
When asked what they would like to have in their new neighbourhoods, both the children and their parents said they would like a supermarket, a playground and a pharmacy.
What they least like about their neighbourhoods is the mud and garbage in the streets, the damp and the cold in the wintertime, and the street fights and drug dealing and use.
In its effort to eliminate slums, A Roof for Chile depends on donations and volunteer work: groups of high school or university students, or companies and their staff cover the costs of the housing materials and build a simple wooden house for a beneficiary family, who work alongside the volunteers.
The Foundation takes care of the purchase and transportation of the materials, and its staff members provide advice in the field. The two groups - the volunteer builders and the beneficiary family - are introduced several weeks before construction begins.
The small wooden houses serve as decent, but temporary, emergency homes for the families as the Foundation helps them apply for state subsidies for the construction of solid permanent dwellings in the new low-income housing projects that are gradually replacing the country’s slums.
'For us, the little wooden houses we build are emergency housing for families in urgent need of solutions - people who need a decent structure to live in during the two years that it takes on average to build their permanent new housing,' Gabriel Prudencio, the foundation’s head of construction, told IPS a year ago.
The initiative, which has been replicated in most other nations of Latin America under the name Un Techo para mi País (A Roof for My Country), has won international recognition.
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service