Location
Ricaurte, Ecuador

Name of partner
Unidad Educativa Especializada Fiscomisional Nuestra Señora del Carmen (U.E.E.F.N.S.C)

Context
The educational unit’s mission is to provide comprehensive services and improve the living conditions of people, especially children, living with physical and/or intellectual disabilities and to enable them to achieve their social, educational and professional inclusion, through the active participation of families, through community awareness and through the promotion of continuous staff training.

Main project objectives
Promote the social inclusion of people with physical and mental disabilities in the Ricaurte community.
In the context of a global pandemic – COVID-19:
– Maintain accessibility to technological tools at the Unidad Educativa Especializada Fiscomisional Nuestra Señora Del Carmen (U.E.E.F.N.S.C).
– Guarantee personalized physiotherapy care for students with disabilities and support for families in carrying out therapeutic activities.
– Allow technological accessibility to children and adolescents in the community.
– Ensuring the continuation of schooling until the end of their school year for children and adolescents from the Eradication of Child Labor (ETI) project.
– Support the feeding of the children of the partner school as well as their families for the back-to-school period and mid-year.

Summary of activities carried out
– The continuation of funding for internet connections and digital platforms to ensure the maintenance of online educational activities.
– The provision of community connection points allowing children and adolescents who do not have access to technological tools to continue their educational activities from these connection points to ensure the continuation of their education and thus curb the increase in child labor that has occurred since the start of the pandemic.
– The financing of the salary of a promoter for the child labor eradication program to make the link between the partner in the South, the schools (if outside the UEENSC), the children and their families in order to look after the children motivated to continue their studies and not fall into the false ease of work.
– Salary funding for a physiotherapist to maintain personalized physiotherapy care for children and adolescents with disabilities
– The allocation of food baskets to 150 children living with physical and/or intellectual disabilities as well as their families.