Rubén is a Youth representative from Latin America attending the upcoming Youth Forum at the GFMD in Quito, and who will facilitate the roundtable on “Supporting arrival cities with migration and harnessing rural transformation for development”. He was a participant to last year’s Youth Forum held in conjunction with the Marrakech conference in 2018.
Ruben is a young Costa Rican activist, student and researcher working on the processes of
centralamerican migration. He is a student of International Relations and Integration at the
Federal University of Latinamerican Integration (UNILA) in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, where he focuses on South-South migration in Centralamerica. One of his key focuses is the transformations of rural towns as both sender and receiver communities of migration flows, and the implications for development. He is the co-founder of the Central American Research Center at his university, where students from the entire region work together on relevant research projects, and lead talks and workshops about forced migration and violence. As part of his activism, he notably founded in 2018 the "Support Network for the Nicaraguan Migrant in San Ramon, Palmares and Naranjo,'' working in partnership with civil society and local authorities to create in the three towns “safe places for migrants” through coupling concrete humanitarian actions with the creation and implementation of appropriate public policies. He has been organizing workshops for human rights education with youth from rural areas as educator of the Latinamerican organization 'Empoderando Juventudes' (Empowering Youth) in Costa Rica and Brazil since 2017.
