Cédric Sottiaux, an employee at BNP Paribas Luxembourg, has been one of the beneficiaries of the Helping Hand for Employees’ Projects programme supported by the BNP Paribas Foundation, for his involvement in the MOJOCA association (Movement for Street Children in Guatemala). Founded in 1989, the organization aims to promote the education and social and professional integration of young boys and girls who are destitute and condemned to living on the streets of Guatemala.

M.Lutte in the foyer of MOJOCA

MOJOCA not only offers these children housing and education, but also goes the extra mile, providing them with various other services, such as education grants, professional training, psychological support, a health service and legal assistance.

Even once they have completed their studies, MOJOCA continues to support the children by helping them find work and somewhere to live, thereby enabling them to become completely independent.

Mr. Gérard Lutte, founder of MOJOCA, talks to us about the history of the organisation and its mission.

What gave you the idea for this organisation, and why Guatemala?

As a lecturer in psychology, I wrote a book on the street children of Guatemala called “Guatemalan street children, Princesses and Dreamers”, published by l’Harmattan in 1997. The children gave personal accounts, they told their own stories, they were so endearing with their desperate desire to live, their intelligence, their sensitivity… They did not see themselves living in the institutions in which the authorities were trying to place them.
After talking to them, we came up with the idea of creating a self-managed organisation, based on friendship and not on a hierarchical structure where the adults are in charge and the young have to obey.

Study session at MOJOCA

In your opinion, how does this project contribute to sustainable development?
I think this is an extremely important project in terms of sustainable development because one of the problems highlighted by the International Labour Organisation is that unemployment is rife among young people in Latin America, particularly in Central America where there are not enough schools, and the education is not broad enough. Therefore, we are trying through education and professional training to turn these young people into citizens so that they can participate in the development of their country. We think that investment today in Latin America and in the world in general should, first and foremost, take young people and their education and training into consideration. If we just leave young people, as is the case in many countries, unemployed and untrained, they will simply become a destructive factor in society; so, by involving young people and encouraging them to assume responsibility, we hope to participate in the sustainable development of these societies.

And do you think this project will have a lasting effect?

The project will have a lasting effect for two reasons. Firstly, because the young people themselves, who have received training, who have come off the streets and are reintegrated into society (we already have several hundred such cases), have the means to provide for their needs on their own and are able to help others.

And the second reason for the project’s durability is that we train instructors, we train young people so they are capable of managing the association’s entities and are less and less reliant on external assistance.
If the children receive a good education, are not exposed to violence and are able to attend school we can help them, we can break the vicious circle whereby once you’ve been on the streets you can easily fall back into that way of life. We give street children a helping hand, but they too can help us build a society which is more tolerable to live in and so, whatever we give them, they give back to us a hundred times over.

Have a look at how MOJOCA works (audio in Spanish, subtitles in French)