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Latin America, a region long shaped by human migration, is today facing one of the most complex mobility crises in the world, driven by interlinked and interdependent factors such as climate disasters, shifting political tides, armed conflict, and the economic realities of everyday life. The ultimate impact of these geopolitical winds falls on an estimated 14.1 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean who will need life-saving support in 2026.

Over the past year, the context in the region has grown even more complex. Restrictive migration policies, the closing of the U.S.–Mexico border, rising deportations, the growing impact of climate disasters, violence linked to organized crime, and economic instability are all reshaping migration across the region. While northbound flows have declined, movement southward has increased, and on the route between Panama and Colombia one in every five migrants crossing is a child.

Millions of children remain exposed to risks, rights violations, and breaches of their most fundamental rights, including access to medical care, adequate nutrition, quality education, and the ability to enjoy full physical, mental, spiritual, and social development.

Civil Society’s Irreplaceable Role

In the face of this landscape, the work of civil society organizations is irreplaceable. They are the ones consistently present in shelters, soup kitchens, community centers, border crossings, and host neighborhoods. Their value lies not only in being the first to arrive and respond to needs, but in sustaining relationships of trust, recognizing early warning signs of risk, and connecting families with local services. Yet territorial presence alone does not guarantee continuity in accompanying children on their journeys. For a network of civil society organizations to function, contributing to an interconnected ecosystem that coordinates its actions and makes the best use of its resources, it needs shared criteria, referral mechanisms, data protection, traceability, and the capacity to learn from evidence. This is where the central contribution of Vidas en Movimiento (Lives in Motion) lies.

Against this backdrop, Vidas en Movimiento (VEM) launched in 2025. Coordinated by the Inter-American Dialogue and the Fundación Eugenio Mendoza (FEM), with support from the FEMSA Foundation, VEM aims to strengthen the ability of organizations to coordinate and cooperate with one another, enabling more consistent, faster, and more humane assistance for migrant children.

Vidas en Movimiento combines a digital platform with a network of organizations to record, under shared criteria, the care history of migrant children and adolescents, identify their needs, and facilitate connections between services along the migration route. At each point along the route, organizations can securely record data on children and their families, including origin and destination, family composition, support received, and outstanding needs (education, health, social and employment support).

Vidas en Movimiento consolidates a regional network of actors that connects families with local services and, through a shared language, enables better tracking and support of children on the move. The innovation lies not simply in knowing how many children were served, but in ensuring that the next organization can continue their care without starting from zero.

Getting Started: Pilot Results

The results of the VEM pilot are striking: the platform registered more than 4,500 people, including 3,300 children (60 percent of them age 7 or younger). Among all these individuals, 1,500 families were identified, of which more than 53 percent passed through more than one point of care, confirming one of VEM’s most valuable contributions: effective connection between organizations. When a family arrives at a point of care and later continues on its route, the next organization can immediately see what support the family received, what needs it has, and what its priorities are. This reduces duplication, speeds up decision-making, and improves the quality of care.

Twenty-five social organizations from Colombia and Venezuela joined VEM as partners, confirming both the interest in and the need for coordination grounded in real evidence. Participating organizations have built a shared language: all of them record and analyze information under common criteria, which makes it easier to make decisions, plan joint interventions, and act preventively. The platform also operates under a data-handling policy that ensures this collaboration and information-sharing does not compromise privacy and guarantees the protection of personal data.

The data collected revealed, among other findings, that more than 50 percent of children migrate for economic reasons and that more than 90 percent of the responsible adults lack a work or residency permit, which heightens the risk of a lack of protection. Having this information has helped ensure better monitoring and care throughout these families’ migration journeys, making it possible to coordinate services, set priorities, plan joint interventions, and act preventively.

Why Civil Society Is a Key Actor

It is clear that civil society organizations are a central actor with immeasurable potential to provide assistance to children on the move:

• They fill a gap the State cannot always fill. Child protection systems and government capacity in countries of transit and destination are frequently overwhelmed.
• They have a presence on the ground at the exact points where crossings happen—shelters, soup kitchens, border centers—allowing them to detect and respond to risk situations in real time.
• They protect the most vulnerable within an already vulnerable group: unaccompanied or separated children face disproportionate risk over the course of their migration journey.
• They don’t just assist—they document and report. Many organizations record rights violations and abuses by authorities, and use that evidence for advocacy, pushing for structural improvements in migration and child-protection policy.

A Central Figure In Protecting Migrant Children

Civil society organizations represent a central figure without which much of the real protection afforded to migrant children would not be possible. Within this framework, Vidas en Movimiento has established itself as a regional project bringing together a growing number of civil society organizations in Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, seeking to give continuity and a voice to children in situations of mobility across our region.

At a moment of profound transformation in migration dynamics across Latin America—with historic peaks in the number of migrating children, route closures, forced returns, and constantly shifting migration corridors—it is the organizations present in communities of transit, reception, and return that are first to identify new risk routes, provide the initial humanitarian response, and sustain children’s journeys. Vidas en Movimiento answers precisely that need: weaving a regional network that gives continuity to the support of migrant children beyond borders, and that restores their voice in a phenomenon too often measured only in numbers.

To learn more about Vidas en Movimiento and get your organization involved, please contact: Mercedes Davico, mdavico@thedialogue.org