Madrid awards €15.6 million contract to NGO for 116 migrant children

Sixteen million for 116 children: the per-place price dividing Madrid

The Regional Government of Madrid has put in black and white what it costs to care for an unaccompanied foreign minor: €134,670.99 per head. The Regional Ministry of Family, Youth and Social Affairs awarded Fundación Diagrama a contract worth €15,621,834.80 to manage the initial reception and medium-term stay of 116 minors over 23 months. Broken down, the figure amounts to €5,855.26 per child per month, around €192.37 a day. The contract includes training, workshops and school monitoring, but the price per place has peine up a dispute that goes far beyond migration management.

The cost per place and the awkward comparison

At that rate, each child costs more than a room in central Madrid. The comparison with what a gifted student receives in scholarships has spread like wildfire on social media: with that budget, 116 scholarships for gifted students could have been funded, and the discontent is real. Some argue the cost is justified by the integration programmes: 20 hours of additional training a year, health and drug prevention activities, and monitoring of school adjustment. Others, however, calculate that a substantial chunk of the pie stays within the organisation's structure. The suspicion that only ten percent of the contract actually reaches the children cannot be verified, but it defines the climate of scepticism.

The political contradiction

The regional government, which has made reining in social spending one of its core policies, now faces pressure from those reminding it of its election manifesto. In the programme it ran on, it pledged to invest whatever it took to facilitate the integration of the most disadvantaged immigrants. Looking at the contract, critics say that wish has been granted with generous budgeting. The paradox does not end there: the very people who welcome the arrival of these children are now the ones attacking the cost, while defenders of the measure point out that reception is not a business, but a legal obligation.

The regional trickle

The case is not an isolated one. In Cantabria, the Asociación Nueva Vida is set to manage 194 children in a 100,000-square-metre site with several buildings. The terms of the conversation repeat themselves: cost per place, suspicions about the NGO, and the question of whether the reception system is designed for the child or for the invoice. The outsourcing of these services has become a growing business, and every new award feeds the same pattern of reproaches.

At €192.37 per child per day, the price exceeds that of many private residential care places. No one has yet explained why housing a child costs more than a suite in a four-star hotel. The answer, in all likelihood, does not fit in a tweet.