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Building Cercanías between
the state and families in Uruguay
Beatriz Rocco, Valeria Gradín, Gustavo Machado, Marina Cal and Luis Orbán,
Ministry of Social Development – Cercanías Coordination Program
A
dvancing
S
ocial
I
ntegration
and
I
ntergenerational
S
olidarity
U
ruguay is a small country with a population of
almost 3.3 million. Having built a welfare state
early on, the country now has the lowest levels of
inequality in Latin America.
Real de Azúa, a Uruguayan intellectual of the twentieth
century, described Uruguay as a ‘country of the cercanías’
(‘cercanías’ means neighbourhood, proximity or commuter),
of the ‘middle class’. He said the country was favoured by
its geographical accessibility (a gently undulating peneplain)
and, by extension, by the proximity of the different social
sectors and identification with a common historical tradition.
However, since the crises of the 1990s, and especially since
2002, this society and the construction of identity that accompa-
nies it has been fractured by a sharp increase in poverty and social
fragmentation. These effects have been significantly reversed,
with continuous reductions in poverty since 2005. Currently,
8.2 per cent of Uruguay’s families are in poverty, and 0.3 per
cent in extreme poverty. However, the basic rights of a significant
number of families are still being violated through social exclu-
sion, employment, and educational and residential segregation.
The role of the state in guaranteeing these rights is key,
especially in the definition and implementation of public poli-
cies to promote access for these families to substantial services
and improved quality of life.
The National Strategy for Strengthening Family Capabilities
(Cercanías) is an inter-agency initiative that prioritizes fami-
lies in extreme vulnerability. It involves the coordinated
action of the agencies involved to ensure effective access to
benefits, rights and services.
Cercanías is integrated by the Ministry of Social
Development (MIDES), Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning
and the Environment, Ministry of Labour and Social Security,
Ministry of Public Health, Managing Health Services,
National Public Education Administration, Institute of Social
Security and the Institute for Children and Adolescents of
Uruguay. Activities are organized at the national level by the
Political-Technical Commission, and at territorial level by
interdepartmental or regional committees formed for local
joint strategy. Cercanías’s actions focus on three areas:
• managing change in social policy, including work to address
problems connected with the population, individuals or
age groups, and comprehensive work with families, with a
diversity of projects focusing on subjects such as rights
• articulation of policies, public programmes and services
to ensure priority access to basic social services
• technical support to families in extreme vulnerability,
such as articulated proximity programmes and local
support networks.
The strategy seeks to contribute to change in public institu-
tions in order to overcome fragmentation and overlapping,
improve coordination of services at the local level, and
promote networking and comprehensiveness in primary
“In today’s Uruguay, with sustained economic growth, increased
investment in social policies and programmes and low levels
of unemployment, a number of families still face structural
vulnerability.
The efforts made in the country to provide financial transfers to
meet the basic needs of these extremely vulnerable families are
essential, but must be accompanied by a technical team of proximity
to strengthen their parenting skills, labour processes, education,
and social and territorial inclusion.
The family has gone through various developments so that today,
is not possible to talk about ‘the family’ but about families, family
arrangements, single parents, family composition etc. When thinking
about how to intervene, how to reach these nuclei, it is essential to
understand this process of transformation.
We understand families as nuclei where, through established
links, we create a privileged space of intervention through which we
can help them strengthen ties, support processes, identify problems,
and discover possible solutions and alternatives.
We have been working with family members in various areas
including classrooms, social approaches, health and community
spaces among others. But it is a reality that while each of them
can attain many achievements or developments by themselves,
they cannot support these due to a lack of back-up, support or
understanding in the family.
The house and the family are spaces that enable, but which
can also clog and hinder. In this understanding lies our belief that
visiting families allows for more in-depth work and brings us closer
to another reality that can enable us, using technical knowledge, to
work with families to build other alternatives and supports.
We know that families are private spaces where it is not easy to
enter. Therefore, developing this strategy is a major challenge. For
the same reason, properly recording each intervention will give us
many inputs that enable us to know family realities in new ways.
These will certainly provide great input for future policy design.
We believe that close accompaniment is an appropriate strategy to
ensure social inclusion and to change the system that has previously
excluded people to one of universal social benefits.”
– Daniel Olesker, Minister of Social Development, Uruguay
The need for the Cercanías strategy