Capital: Buenos Aires
Area: 2,766,889 km²
Population: 40 million (July 2006)
Ethnic groups: of European origin
Official language(s): Spanish
Religion(s): Roman Catholic
Currency: 1 Argentine peso = 100 centavos
SOS Children's Villages' activities in the country
The SOS Children's Village work in Argentina started in 1963 when Monsignor Carlos Gardella, having met Hermann Gmeiner, started up a local scheme to realise the SOS Children's Village model. At a time when the economic policies of the country were being liberalised, Father Gardella and a group of dedicated helpers committed themselves to trying to set up a suitable child welfare facility amongst the terrible poverty in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Over the years, this example was followed at other locations in Argentina: In 1979, when Francisco Baumeister and his wife Mabel Krieger launched a project to support children in great need in Oberá, a town in the north eastern province of Misiones; the project was subsequently extended and has been run as SOS Children's Village ever since. About nine years after initial activities an SOS Hermann Gmeiner Primary School and, in 1992, a secondary school were added. The huge demand for places meant that it had soon become necessary to increase the number of family houses in the SOS Children's Village from six to eleven. Another SOS Children's Village with six family houses was built in 1982 in Mar del Plata, about 400 kilometres south of the capital, on the Atlantic coast.
In 1996, the Argentinean SOS Children's Village Association was founded. Its aim was to ensure that educational work was based and elaborated on Hermann Gmeiner's principles and also to make the administration for all the SOS Children's Village facilities simpler. Thus, SOS Children's Villages Argentina was able to meet the huge need for places in the families for orphaned and abandoned children with new and combined vigour. This need was borne in mind in Mar del Plata in 1997. Because of the lack of integration possibilities for the children and youths in the state schools and at the work place in the vicinity of the SOS Children's Village, it was decided to build a new village at a suitable location rather than enlarging the existing SOS Children's Village.
An SOS Kindergarten was added to this new and somewhat larger SOS Children's Village two years later.
In the year 2000 a new SOS Children's Village started operations. It is located in Córdoba, the second-largest city in Argentina which is situated in the heart of the country. The latest SOS Children’s Village in Luján is operating since February 2008 and was officially inaugurated by SOS Children’s Villages President Mr. Helmut Kutin in November 2008.
Following the economic disasters and the unstable political and economic situation of the past years, poverty and insecurity have had their affects on wide elements of the population - according to official figures from 2002 seven out of ten children live below the poverty line. The demand for facilities for the needy is greater than ever.
In 2006, SOS Children’s Villages started to operate SOS Family Strengthening Programmes, which enable children who are at risk of losing the care of their family to grow within a caring family environment. To achieve this, SOS Children’s Villages works directly with families and communities to empower them to effectively protect and care for their children, in cooperation with local authorities and other service providers.
Presently, there are four SOS Children's Villages in operation, three SOS Youth Facilities, two SOS Kindergartens, two SOS Social Centres and one SOS Hermann Gmeiner School in Argentina.