On Wednesday, Governor Maximiliano Pullaro led the signing of a memorandum of understanding with UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, renewing the strategic partnership between the Province and the international organisation.
The agreement strengthens cooperation in literacy, perinatal health, child nutrition and the protection of children’s rights. It also adds new areas of work, including digital transformation in education, planning and monitoring child-related policies, immunisation and non-violent parenting.
In addition, nine Santa Fe municipalities — Ceres, El Trébol, Esperanza, Firmat, Las Parejas, Roldán, San Justo, San Javier and Villa Ocampo — formally joined the “Municipalities United for Children and Adolescents” (MUNA) initiative. They join Santa Fe, Rafaela, Rosario, Reconquista, Venado Tuerto and Vera, which are set to complete the programme’s four-year cycle in 2026.
“This memorandum of understanding sets the course for the Province: to work across government departments and to plan public policies that have a positive impact on the lives and rights of children and young people,” said Pullaro during the ceremony, held in the Salón Blanco at the Government House.
The governor added: “What we are signing today are the objectives we have set ourselves and the public policies we intend to implement.”
Contributing to the province’s efforts
For her part, UNICEF’s Deputy Representative in Argentina, María Elena Úbeda Castillo, expressed her satisfaction at being able to contribute, through this agreement, “to the efforts you are already making to advance children’s rights”.
“Santa Fe is a province we follow with particular interest because of all the progress it has made. There are many aspects of your work worth highlighting, which is why we are delighted to be able to offer our support,” she said.
Úbeda Castillo explained that, over the next two years, the cooperation will include specialised technical assistance, support for capacity-building processes and backing for policies and programmes that are already underway.
During his address, he acknowledged that Santa Fe has “a wide-ranging work programme” and commended the detailed analysis carried out on the situation of children, as well as the identification of specific priorities from an intersectoral perspective. “The Province is focusing its main efforts on essential strategies to achieve positive results in fulfilling children’s rights,” he noted.
In this regard, she highlighted the province’s commitment to perinatal health and to strengthening maternity units and their teams to incorporate safe, respectful and high-quality practices. She also mentioned the updating and improvement of dietary guidelines for children, a pioneering initiative which, she stated, places Santa Fe at the forefront of a widespread challenge across the country: ensuring adequate nutrition from the earliest years of life.
Regarding education, the UNICEF representative praised “the province’s sustained leadership in the agenda for digital transformation in education”, alongside the regulatory and institutional progress that ensures the continuity of ongoing initiatives and the decision to maintain reading, writing and literacy as a strategic priority.
Political will
The province’s Secretary for International Relations, Claudio Díaz, explained that the memorandum signed “is a legal instrument that institutionalises Santa Fe’s political will to broaden and deepen its cooperation agenda with organisations such as UNICEF”.
In its Country Programme for Argentina, UNICEF considers sub-national governments to be key actors in the implementation of policies for children in a federal country, as the provinces fund two-thirds of social spending allocated to children and implement 70 per cent of these policies.
The event was attended by the Minister for Education, José Goity; the Minister for Health, Silvia Ciancio; the Minister for Equality and Human Development, Victoria Tejeda; and the Minister for Government and Public Innovation, Fabián Bastia, alongside other provincial officials, legislators, mayors and community leaders. Representing UNICEF were Sebastián Waisgrais, specialist in Monitoring and Social Inclusion, and María Fernanda Potenza, Social Policy Officer and coordinator of the MUNA programme.
