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Wiñari Project: Combating Exploitive Child Labor among Indigenous Children Through Education in Ecuador

The goal of Project Wiñari (Wiñari means “growing from the bottom” in Kichwa, an indigenous language) is to reduce the number of current and potential child laborers in the indigenous population by increasing their enrollment and encouraging them to stay in school, by reducing their work hours, and removing them from hazardous work altogether.

The project’s approach to combat child labor focuses on addressing main obstacles to indigenous children enrolling in, continuing, and completing their basic education. The project relies on three strategies to achieve its goal:

• Awareness raising about the effects of child labor on the right to education, using child participation, community mobilization, and public service announcements via radio.
• Increased formal and alternative educational opportunities for child laborers through accelerated education programs, secondary technical/vocational programs, mainstreaming of children who complete the accelerated program, teacher training and community participation to improve bilingual schools, and various school dropout prevention services as described before.
• Institutional and policy strengthening and strategic alliances to enhance sustainability through establishing “Consultative Committees” at the national and local levels to have all the key stakeholders of the project, including local government and indigenous organizations, incorporate combating indigenous child labor as a central axis of their action, and collaborate directly with national and provincial government educational department to have them adapt various educational programs to be developed by the project.

Wiñari’s interventions supported the removal of over 4,700 of Ecuador’s indigenous children from hazardous work environments through their enrollment in education-based programs, and prevention of 6,300 from engaging in child labor activities.  World Learning developed and implemented accelerated learning, after school and summer school programs that contributed to the enrollment and retention of overage children who dropped out of schools. The project’s approach of involving various stakeholders’ – particularly indigenous groups -- in project design, follow-up and evaluation- was a corner stone in its success. In its last year of operation, the project is focusing on transferring the Wiñari methodology to National Institute of Children and Families (INFA) to ensure the sustainability of its impact.