TECHO is a youth-led non-profit organization present in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through the joint work of families living in extreme poverty and youth volunteers, TECHO seeks to overcome poverty in slums. TECHO is convinced that poverty can be permanently eradicated if society as a whole recognizes poverty as a priority and actively works towards overcoming it.
Therefore, TECHO pursues three strategic objectives:
- The promotion of community development in slums, through a process of community strengthening that promotes representative and validated leadership, and drives the organization and participation of thousands of families living in slums to generate solutions to their own problems.
- Fostering social awareness and action, with special emphasis on generating critical and determined volunteers working with the families living in slums while involving different social entities.
- Political advocacy that promotes necessary structural changes to ensure that poverty does not continue reproducing itself and that it decreases rapidly.
Priorities as a partner of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data
TECHO works with young volunteers and community representatives in more than 630 of Latin America’s informal settlements, promoting the development of communities and incentivizing the community to develop/use its capacities. TECHO is convinced that overcoming poverty in the region is closely linked with the improvement of cities and the integration of informal settlements into them.
Firstly, the construction of participatory and dynamic diagnostics that allow for the visualization of the problem are necessary in order to achieve a genuine integration between informal settlements and cities, which leaves aside the violation of rights that 105 million people suffer today. Secondly, it is necessary to make adequate decisions in order to address structural problems in the region and open data will be fundamental to this and to measure progress and government’s commitments to Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
TECHO’s rapid expansion, leadership, proven framework, and continuous commitment to the reality of the poorest in the region has allowed us to develop innovative and high-impact projects and understand better the lives of those who live in informal settlements, the challenges they face, and the capacity communities have to transform their habitat.
TECHO is committed to ensuring the promises of the SDGs reach populations living in informal settlements, as well as working with neighbors and volunteers in order to feed their ideas, proposals, and experiences into the implementation of Agenda 2030.
We want these commitments to become a reality so the most excluded populations of Latin America and the world become a priority. We acknowledge the data revolution, the democratization of information, and its effectiveness to bring novel solutions to our most complex problems, are an integral part in overcoming this challenge.