Empower and educate teenage mothers in Chile

At Hogar de Cristo we believe that our role is to make the invisible visible. We want to show the reality of the poorest and most vulnerable children and young people, who do not march or protest, who do not ask for demands, who have no hope. Before the pandemic, there were 186 thousand, in 2021 there was talk of some 40 thousand more. Today we do not know. There is no priority in counting them. There are more urgent issues, more political, in terms of education.

It is necessary to take care of a type of student who has everything against him: repetitions, expulsions, bullying, absences, annotations, reputation of conflictive. Adversities that are the product of a variety of problems: social, economic, family, learning. In other words, a boy, girl or young person, who seems to everyone "a piece of shit".

But the world, especially those who live in poverty and exclusion, is full of "cachos" and in order for them to stop being so, a specialized educational offer of reentry is required. A dedicated, financed and ad hoc attention to their reality.

When we face the problems in education, it usually happens that what is urgent eats up what is important and the dilemma is always where to start from. This is the main challenge for decision makers and public policy designers. The pandemic has left large learning gaps in the cognitive and socioemotional areas, as well as in the academic area. But it has also left many by the wayside. Out.  Dropout, as the gringos say.

The government talks about educational justice and the installation of a new paradigm of education. All relevant but not a priority if we think of those who are out of the system and we must recover. Getting them to return, to re-enter the system through restorative and meaningful educational experiences, should be a matter of life or death for everyone. It is a priority for the country, especially when we see so many young people co-opted by delinquency and drug trafficking in the most vulnerable areas.

We see with concern that "once again" this invisible population is left out of the big plans. And it is strange, because if we talk about educational justice, it should be the first priority: children and young people who dropped out of the education system even before the pandemic and who every day see the impossibility of recovering their right to education.  

Going back to school after many failures and, in some cases, at an age that does not correspond to "normal", is not an easy decision. In Súmate's schools, each student has different stories and motivations, but they are united by the desire to advance.

For example, Javiera (20), whose goal is to finish high school:

"I'm in the first and second year of high school. Last year I wanted to finish first and second but I had a lot of problems. In my adolescence I went through many things and the support the school has given me has been great. Thank God I am better. I haven't been absent, like the other years when I didn't come to class. I had a lot of delays. The Súmate school is a great support because the teachers are not only concerned about your homework, but also about how you are emotionally. They have always been a support for me. When I was a kid I was very lonely and spent all day here because there were problems at home, and they were always aware of my situation."

It took me a while to go back to school, but here I am. I had to work, make money. But then I said, "Now, I'm going to start studying". I talked it over with my mom, I told her I was going to study because it's bad that everyone has finished fourth grade and I'm only in first grade. If tomorrow I have a son, a family, I want to tell him: "Son, I got my fourth year of high school with a two by one, so go to school no more". Today, when I'm 20 and I'm in my first and second year of high school, I have a different mentality.

In the jobs they ask for your fourth year of high school, high school, but there are only false resumes and I don't like to lie. Besides, everyone has a high school diploma. My mom, everybody. Except my dad, but that's a different story. But I want to have my fourth year of high school, that's my goal. 

This is an integration school and the majority of us who come here is because in the other schools they did not receive us because of learning and attention problems, which is already a problem for that school. Second, if the child is bold, has problems and is a problem for that school, they will not receive him. But not here. They receive you. They level you until you are on par with your grade.

The executive director of Fundación Emplea, Jorge Gaju, gives a clear picture of how the pandemic further damaged the labor exclusion of the country's most vulnerable women, even damaging the precarious subsistence livelihoods with which they support themselves and their children.

Today in Chile almost 800 thousand people are not working. They are the so-called "potential inactive", those who, having the talent, the ability and the need, do not manage to overcome by themselves the entry barriers that allow access to the labor market. And they resign themselves to not looking for work. And the most unfair and unfortunate thing is that 65% percent of these 1.5 million potential inactive people are women.

This is explained, in the first place, because before the pandemic and its consequences on employment, they were already in a situation of historical labor disadvantage. Currently, 47% of women participate in the labor market versus 69% of men. And, secondly, because they have always participated in sectors of the economy that have been hard hit by COVID-19, such as domestic service, commerce, tourism and gastronomy, where, in addition, due to the greater physical proximity involved, the risk of contagion is much greater.

As an old and wise feminist recently told me, "looking for some advantage to the impact of the pandemic, let's say that it made visible the tremendous role that women play in the functioning of the economy, although it has not yet translated into anything concrete, except for a growing demand for these care tasks to be paid".

Women do 2.5 times more domestic work than men, which prevents or hinders them from accessing paid employment and/or forces them to combine paid employment with unpaid work. "Women's unpaid work supports the need for care that sustains families, supports economies and often fills gaps in social services, yet it is rarely recognized as work," states a UN Women document.

Another unfortunate aspect of the pandemic is that there is a wide gap that prevents the connection between those seeking work and the companies that need workers. Today, as never before, as a result of the pandemic, there is a need for paid personnel capable of managing small budgets, educating and caring for minors and the elderly, cooking, among other tasks in which housewives carry out, but it is difficult to bring together those who need this service with those who can perform it.

We see this a lot at Fundación Emplea: despite their talent, many women who want to work do not know how to enter the formal labor market, they do not know how to overcome such basic obstacles as how to prepare a résumé, meet schedules, or know who to contact. These women, who are often heads of household, lack contact networks to find formal jobs and do not really know where to start. There is also a strong inertia of informality, which means that people with precarious jobs have much less chance of getting "decent" jobs.

And finally, there is learned hopelessness, which is the lack of growth expectations that poor women feel, accustomed to being discriminated against because of the community where they live, how they speak, how they dress or because they are missing a tooth, despite having all the ability and desire to work.

 In Women's Month, with a government that starts full of pro-women symbols, women's employment must be a priority and for this Fundación Emplea believes that the State must advance in giving a more important role to labor intermediation, turning it into a relevant public policy that complements the current training system. As a candidate repeated in a few seconds in a past election campaign, the demand is: work, work, work with a focus on them, the women.