Children top list of priorities: Working group on a National Agreement for Children begins

President Sebastián Piñera has made a firm commitment to place children at the top of his administration’s priority list as well as that of society as a whole. In order to address this challenge, he called on all political sectors and civil society to participate in a working group to reach a National Agreement for Children, which will propose initiatives to benefit young people.

The group held its first meeting on Monday, April 2. It was presided over by the President and First Lady Cecilia Morel and comprised ministers, government officials, congressmen from various parties and representatives of civil society.

The final document of the National Agreement for Children will include contributions from the recently formed working group as well as ideas that emerge during a stage in which civil society organizations will participate, together with the progress made by the previous administration.

All of this will help to enrich and complement the principles and lines of President Piñera’s government program, which seeks to urgently address the needs of children, particularly those who are the most vulnerable and whose rights have been violated.

Principles and Guidelines

The government proposes the following four principles for this dialogue regarding a National Agreement for Children:

• Children first. In order to ensure their wellbeing and progress, children must be the center of attention of both the State and civil society, and this must determine the order of priorities and allocation of resources.

• Equal opportunities from birth. Special effort must be made to level the playing field so that all children have the same opportunities from infancy.

• At-risk children and those whose rights have been violated must be a priority. The State and society owe them a debt which must be urgently repaid.

• Parents and family are the first caretakers of children. Families must be supported and strengthened, and the conditions must be created that allow them to achieve the best possible quality of life during the different stages of family members’ lives.

Pro-Children Measures

As a complement to the four guiding principles of the dialogue on children, President Piñera presented a broad set of measures designed to make qualitative progress on the rights, protection and comprehensive development of children.

The main measures of the agenda for children include:

• Replacing the agency that currently addresses children’s needs (Sename) with two new public services: the Child and Adolescent Protection Service and the Adolescent Responsibility Service.
• The base subsidy for children’s homes will increase and quality standards will be established to ensure adequate care, providing more resources and improving supervision and oversight, and creating specialized homes for addressing diverse needs.
• Adjustment of the adoption law so that adoptive families can be found in a timely manner based on the interests of the child, ensuring that the process is swift and based on new, modern regulations.
• An early alert system entitled “Child Alert” will be created to quickly identify children at risk.
• The "Todos Aprenden" (Everyone Learns) plan for children who have more difficulties or face educational delays will be implemented, and a special unit will be created to prevent students from dropping out of school.
• The role of civil society in the care and protection of children will be promoted, and universal access to quality early childhood education will be guaranteed starting at the lower middle level.
• A program to improve the quality of the infrastructure of homes for children in state care will be implemented.