For the Kids' Sake: Community Mobilization is the Key to Better Environments for Children

In this PAHO "Perspectives" article, Alexandre Spatuzza writes that communities tend to mobilise together best when the issue is the well-being of children. Children need clean and healthy living spaces to grow and thrive and yet degraded environments in developing countries expose millions of children in the Americas to serious health threats every day. Now communities in Brasil, like Jardim Paraná, are mobilising to improve living conditions and ensure healthier environments for their kids.

"In Latin America and the Caribbean, some 117 million children live in poverty, according to the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Most live in crowded, substandard housing in neighborhoods that lack basic infrastructure. This exposes them to respiratory tract infections and diarrhea—illnesses that along with perinatal conditions are among the top causes of death among children under 5 in the region.

The lack of play space, formal leisure activities and often even access to schooling exposes poor children to another set of environmental risks. Accidents such as falls, traffic accidents, electrocution and suffocation kill an estimated 100,000 children annually in Brazil alone, according to the Brazilian church group Pastoral da Criança. Poverty also increases children's exposure to violence, including stray bullets, domestic abuse and homicide.

There are signs that the situation has improved in some ways in the last decade. Sanitation coverage in the region rose from 66 percent of the population in 1990 to 79 percent in 2000, while potable water coverage rose from 80 percent to 85 percent during the same period, according to the Pan American Center for Sanitary Engineering and Environmental Sciences (CEPIS), a technical center of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). These improvements have contributed to declines in both infant (under age 1) mortality and child (under age 5) mortality throughout the region in the last decade."

With assistance from some international organisations, local communities are beginning to mobilise and advocate successfully for government funds to improve the quality of living. Jardim Paraná is such a community.

"Jardim Paraná's transformation was difficult but did not take long. The community came into being in the early 1990s, when rising rents and lack of housing options prompted some 180 settlers to invade what was at the time privately owned land. In 1995, a court eviction order forced the occupiers to organize, and in the end they and hundreds of other followers purchased the land for just over $570,000 to be paid over 10 years. With legalization came the possibility of improving living conditions.

'The eviction notice was the last straw; ever since then we have organized ourselves,' says Antonio Calisto, a bus driver and community leader.

A second turning point in the neighborhood's history came in 2000, when a child and an adult died of hepatitis after drinking sewage-contaminated water. The deaths prompted demands to the state government for potable water and sewage collection. In October 2001, after several months of protests and negotiations, the whole neighborhood received treated water and a rudimentary sewage collection system from the state sanitation company. Now the community is negotiating a storm drainage system and the installation of a medical post, and is raising funds to build a kindergarten run by the community center..." Calisto says.

Click here for the full article online.