Childhood Challenges in Latin America: Opportunities to Start a Business, Innovate and Make an Impact

Latin America is fertile ground for social entrepreneurship in the children’s market. Why? The region offers great opportunities for creating and growing new startups focused on childhood, because of the needs and childhood challenges in Latin America that girls, boys and teenagers face, especially in the most vulnerable areas of the continent.

These are social problems that startups can address with innovative products, technology and scalable business models that make it possible to change children’s lives.

To get an idea of the situation, let’s look at some childhood challenges in Latin America:

1. Poor development

In 2020, around 3.6 million children in early childhood (from 0 to 5 years old) did not develop in line with their age. The factors behind this problem are: families living in poverty, mothers with lower levels of schooling, and the remoteness of their homes, which makes it harder to access education, health or culture, according to UNICEF data.

2. Education gap

Only 6 out of 10 children between 3 and 4 years old receive early childhood education, which contrasts sharply with the education level of the richest families. These children are 2.5 times more likely to enter education programs, according to UNICEF.

3. Precarious care

Mothers and fathers are key to the overall development of early childhood, since they are usually in charge of raising children. However, according to UNICEF, 1 in 20 children under 5 is left alone or in the care of a child under 10, a situation that does not guarantee the child’s physical and emotional wellbeing.

Opportunities to innovate in education

What would happen if, through your startup, you worked on developing innovative technology solutions to tackle these problems? You could create better life opportunities for millions of girls, boys and teenagers in Latin America, and you would be contributing to the region’s progress. Remember that the foundations of the person a child will become are laid in the first years of life.

So what can startups do to turn these problems into opportunities, and in which sectors can they implement innovative solutions?

The main opportunity to keep evolving is education and access to it, since because of the pandemic many schools had to close their doors. This, together with the poverty levels in the region, makes schooling a priority need.

According to the seminar “Education in Latin America and the Caribbean: the prolonged crisis as an opportunity for restructuring” (2021) by ECLAC, one long-term consequence of the pandemic is that it could force more than 300 thousand girls, boys and teenagers to work, which could make their education difficult or impossible.

This shows the range of growth opportunities in education and access to it in the region. It sets out new paths for you and your venture, since the pandemic opened up a huge space for developing technologies that make education easier for girls, boys and teenagers.

However, there are other areas where startups can find opportunities to take part, such as mental health. As at other stages of life, the socio-emotional development of children between 6 and 13 years old is a fundamental base for overall wellbeing, although factors such as the pandemic greatly affected its progress in recent years.

This is an opportunity for your organization and also a question that needs answering: how can technology, comprehensive education and good mental health be combined? And these development opportunities do not end here, since teenagers also face particular problems that you can help solve.

Adolescence, a segment that should not be left out

As you may have noticed, education is a thread that runs through all of childhood, although the focus changes a little depending on what you should aim for if you want to invest in improving things for both children and teenagers. We explain below.

One of the main problems of education for teenagers today is school coexistence. We have seen it in the many news reports of incidents in classrooms throughout this year, which have caused concern across the region.

According to the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE, 2013), violence and conflict in schools affect “coexistence and teaching processes in the classroom.”

Another finding from the TERCE study that goes along with this is that students who suffer discrimination and belong to excluded groups (immigrants, Indigenous people, students in child labor or from low socioeconomic backgrounds) perceive higher levels of conflict among their peers.

The main causes of the violence in classrooms would be: violence between peers, arms and drug trafficking and, lastly, a lack of material and human resources. This is stated in the World Report on Violence against Children (Pinheiro, 2007).

And that is not all, since the same report indicates that for teenagers, the main problem they suffer is psychological abuse, and it is in this context that the second challenge arises that you should prioritize if you want to contribute to children’s lives.

The pandemic affected all of us across the board. We had to shelter at home for long months, although those who were undoubtedly hit hardest were the region’s teenagers.

A UNICEF study carried out in the first months of the pandemic with more than eight thousand young people between 13 and 29 years old found that 27% of them felt anxiety and 15% depression, mainly (30% of cases) because of their economic situation.

Entrepreneurs have the ability to turn these problems into business opportunities to make an impact on girls, boys and teenagers in Latin America. With innovation, technology, creativity and boldness they could create a better environment that lets them grow and develop properly, and lay the foundations for better life opportunities in the future.

If you already have a startup, you should know that it is possible to accelerate impact by working in synergy with social organizations that address topics focused on childhood, and together create social impact projects with greater reach. Dare to create real change!