Daniel Noboa became the youngest president of Ecuador and Latin America. He is 35 years old, seven years younger than Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who was the youngest president ever.

In Ecuador, young people make up the majority of the population. Noboa is part of more than 7 million citizens who are between 16 and 40 years old. Your vote definitely influenced the election results.

Health, education, child malnutrition and gender-based violence are social axes that will require the urgent attention of the new Government

They are young people looking for a new future, one that allows the country to explore new directions away from old numbers and useless arguments. So many of them saw in Noboa a leader who would lead the country in a different way, from freedom, promoting social, economic and personal development.

Noboa understood them and aimed to win over this electorate and won the elections with them.

Now it will be difficult to rebuild this country into a place where they want to live and feel proud about it.

Difficult problems await you. The situation of children and young people in Ecuador is dramatic. Data provided by the Ministry of Education reveals a dropout rate of 2.11% nationally between 2021 and 2022. For its part, the National Union of Educators reveals that by July 2022 a total of 195,000 boys, girls and adolescents, aged of At the age of 5 and 17, they left their schools and colleges. In the 2023-2024 cycle, however, the number of enrolled students was the lowest in the last six academic periods.

Dropping out of school is due, among other things, to lack of money, family problems, bad grades, work, teenage pregnancy.

“My two children stopped studying in 2020 and 2021,” says the mother of the young people who will return to classrooms this year and who are part of the 105,603 who left or stayed in school during the pandemic.

Young people between the ages of 15 and 24, who leave the classroom, become NEETs, a term that refers to a group of young people who neither study nor work, becoming lost and unproductive human capital, which will not allow them to leave school. poverty, nor social, emotional and psychological problems. In Ecuador, according to ECLAC, there is a staggering increase in the number of NEETs. As of June 2022, 18.5% of young Ecuadorians of this age are NEETs. They neither study nor work.

In such an environment, our boys, girls and young people become easy prey for organized crime and delinquency, which today represent the main problem of Ecuadorians, which increases the risks for them and society as a whole.

A National Police report reveals that between January and June 2023, 1,326 children and adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 were arrested for murder, robbery, illegal possession of weapons and micro-trafficking, among others. Gang members are known to travel through poor neighborhoods of cities in search of children and adolescents whom they lure with money and drugs to join their armed groups.

Recognizing the importance of education for personal development and the development of the country is not new. Children and adolescents, who are outside the education system, have no future. We have to recover them.

Noboa is their hope. (OR)