The following excerpt is from a November 3, 2009 article published in The Guatemala News. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
In a new Survey on Remittances 2009, Children and Adolescents, the eighth in this IOM-Guatemala series and jointly produced with UNICEF, confirms the negative impact of the financial crisis on children and adolescents in Guatemala. The decline in remittances from family members abroad has forced tens of thousands of children to leave school and find work to supplement the family income.
Amongst the 3,000 households interviewed by IOM and UNICEF, 8.7 per cent of the children between 7 and 17 years-old can no longer attend school and 7.4 per cent or 92,905 children of the same age have been forced to find jobs to supplement the family income. “Forty-two per cent of these children were in school in 2008. This confirms the direct impact of the financial crisis on the choices families are making,” explains Delbert Field, IOM Chief of Mission in Guatemala.
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more about Economics & Guatemala.
Comments are closed.