In recent days, Colombian farmers have staged a national strike for more than two weeks and this turned violent when thousands of students, truckers, miners and teachers joined the farmers. The government imposed curfew “Toque de queda” and dry law in some areas including Soacha after protests, violence and rioting struck those areas.
This incident got me thinking about Soacha and the contributions that YTF is already making through education and technology to build a better place for our Colombian youth and the community at large.
Last August, YTF expanded our work into Latin America with the establishment of a Community Technology and Learning Center, the Soacha Digital Village, in Colombia. August marked the one-year anniversary of this work and I had an opportunity to visit Colombia to meet the team. Diana, the program coordinator at YTF’s partner organization, met with me and shared the highlights, successes and challenges to date. The meeting was long overdue and we were both extremely happy to finally meet each other in person after several Skype, phone and email communications. As I recently came onboard with YTF to help with the organizations strategy in Colombia, it helped to gain a better understanding of how the center came to be and the incredible impact YTF was making in Soacha.
Diana explained to me how in 2001, a group of community members from Soacha, aware of the multiple needs in the area, decided to create the foundation “Semilla y Fruto” to build solutions around the most pressing issues its population faces: forced displacement, extreme poverty, children and adolescents with high levels of malnutrition, juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy, lack of education and labor opportunities. The Soacha Digital Village is a partnership between Semilla y Fruto, a grassroots organization in Colombia and YTF. Semilla y Fruto works with children and their parents through programs that focus on education, nutrition and the use of free-time (“Totto al tablero”) as well as income generating programs.
YTF’s participatory model works knowing that local partners understand their communities better, speak the language and know the culture more than we do. It is our vision to co-develop programs and jointly implement solutions, the beneficiaries have voiced, will best meet their needs.
Youth in Soacha are one of the most vulnerable populations in Colombia. It is widely recognized that they are disproportionately at risk of continued recruitment by guerrillas, paramilitaries, and local gangs in their new settlements. Only 29% of the population is originally from Soacha. This region has a significant portion of families who have been displaced by Colombia’s internal armed conflict in the countryside: around 31,551 registered by the Colombian government with 42% of them being underage.
Some interesting facts about Soacha :
• The unemployment rate in Soacha is 15.6% impacting mainly the youth (age 15-24).
• 16.5% of the population has “vulnerable employment.”
• 53.8% live in extreme poverty and another 20.4% are homeless.
• There are around ~ 89,000 families, about 19% of them relying on single moms as
providers.
• More than 50% of the houses in Soacha are “illegal,” this situation increases the
problems to have access to public services, given that these homes are not included in
the government plan of urban development.
• The average school education level in Soacha’s population is 6.8 years. Only 8.4%
of the population has college or technical degree.
• Estimated Internet access in Soacha is 1.7% (as number of subscriptions/total population).
• Soacha’s population is projected to grow more than 3.5% per year.
Our work at the Soacha Digital Village serves children (ages 5 – 12), youth (ages 13 – 20) and adults, particularly women, in the community. The center offers after-school programs that address ‘free time’ and integrate technology into their activities, computer classes offered at low cost to unemployed adults and at risk youth and job training programs. The center is open 5 days a week in the afternoon and all day on Saturday. Over 120 youth have received training at the Soacha Digital Village since its opening a year ago.
In the very near future, the youth enrolled at the Soacha Digital Village will begin to utilize some virtual programs supported and provided by the government, such as: “SENA Virtual” and “Colombia Aprende”, e-portals that offer a diverse and rich catalog of free virtual classes including English, web and graphic design, programming, office administration, accounting, bakery/cooking, tourism, agriculture and health.
We anticipate that the center’s usage is going to increase as YTF introduces new programs. No other organizations offer the services we are offering (after-school education, technology and nutrition) in Soacha. An immediate goal is to move into a larger space that will be more easily accessible to the community at large.
We can tell already the impact our work is having on the lives of the young people we are working with and look forward to providing access to information to aid the education of so many more young people in Colombia.
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Paula Grajales Calle is YTF’s Business Development Lead for Latin America. She writes from the U.S. where she works to build regional and national fundraising and communications capacity across the continent by providing guidance, targeted technical support and a clear operating framework. A native of Colombia, Paula is passionate about education, employment and development for youth.
