Program to Improve the Quality of Education for Vulnerable Children and Adolescents in Cartago, Valle del Cauca, Colombia.

  • Country: Colombia
  • Location: Cartago, Department of Valle del Cauca.
  • Duration: December 2024 to November 2025
  • Participants: 455 children and adolescents, between 4 and 18 years old, from families experiencing poverty and social exclusion.
  • Area of specialization: Vocational and micro-entrepreneurship training.

Starting point

Cartago is the most important Colombian municipality in the northern department of Valle del Cauca, with a population of just over 140,000. It has a strategic geographic location and an economy based on agriculture, livestock, commerce, and small-scale industry. However, this municipality has not experienced socioeconomic development commensurate with the region’s capabilities and is classified as a slow-growing and uncompetitive city. Furthermore, it is a territory marked by gang violence, disputes between gangs that generate security problems, personal vendettas, drug addiction, contract killings, common crime, forced disappearances of adolescents, and prostitution.

As a result, the municipality of Cartago faces social and economic problems such as poverty, unmet basic needs, unequal economic development, low access to health services, weak development of the productive sector, common crime, high insecurity, and low levels of education.

Regarding the latter, Cartago has experienced a decline in the percentage of people meeting basic educational competencies, due to low educational coverage, deficient school infrastructure, poor connectivity and access to ICTs, an inadequate school feeding program, and a high dropout rate. Thus, the existing gaps lead to inequity in development and learning opportunities. This situation poses challenges in terms of fostering reading and writing, mathematical thinking, and socioemotional skills, among others. Hence the need to improve the quality of education and expand the range of training programs, human talent, entrepreneurship, employability, and information technology. All of these skills are essential for achieving social and economic development opportunities for the new generations in the Municipality of Cartago.

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Objective

Contribute to improving the quality of education for girls, boys, and adolescents in the Municipality of Cartago, Department of Valle del Cauca, Colombia.

What is the project about

This proposal addresses four critical problems in the department of Valle del Cauca, and especially in the municipality of Cartago:

  1. Economic and social inequalities.
  2. Unemployment among young people aged 18 and over.
  3. The exclusion of young people in vulnerable situations, as a result of inequality that increases multidimensional poverty and socioeconomic disadvantages that prevent them from meeting basic needs.
  4. The lack of quality education to reduce the economic dynamics and internal conflict that cause unemployment, a driving factor in youth exclusion, after completing primary and secondary school.

For all these reasons, the proposal contemplates the institutional strengthening of the Juan XXIII Educational Center to improve educational quality, through three lines of action:

i. Strengthen the knowledge and skills of 455 girls, boys, and young people in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) through the construction and operation of a digital laboratory for the application and practice of real-life situations.

ii. Promote the entrepreneurial spirit of 155 adolescents, between 16 and 18 years old (55% women), by developing and strengthening basic entrepreneurial competencies and employability skills. This seeks, on the one hand, to stimulate the entrepreneurial and creative spirit of young people, contributing to the creation of ventures and the definition of their business models. And, on the other, to strengthen their soft skills for career development.

iii. Awareness-raising sessions on Children’s Rights and the Culture of Peace, aimed at strengthening their civic capacities and the peaceful resolution of the conflict in Colombia and the fulfillment of human rights, and enabling them to contribute as conscious citizens to the peace and reconciliation processes in their country.

The children and young people of today are the future. By offering them a quality education and the skills necessary to function in a work environment, they are being given the tools that, in due course, will help them access jobs that will allow them to improve their living conditions.

Entities that support this project