In a remote region of Colombia, BBVA leads an educational improvement project
To reach Panqueba, a small municipality located in the north of the Boyacá region in the eastern central part of Colombia, you have to drive for over nine hours on a highway, which is considered to be of vital importance in Colombian historical and economic life. The highway crosses tourist and industrial areas in the region, from the capital Bogota through various thermal floors, ending up in the foothills of the Serrania del Cocuy, an imposing complex of mountains and glaciers where this municipality, which makes up the province of Gutierrez, along with five others, is located.
Here, in this province that also includes the municipalities of Chiscas, Cocuy, Güican, Guacamayas and El Espino, BBVA Colombia, under the framework of an alliance with UNICEF and the Ministry of Education, brings forward an ambitious project to assist in improving educational quality in 11 institutions in the region with a total of 109 sites serving over 3,000 students. The Boyacá Department of Education (Regional Authority) has also joined in implementing this project along with two operating entities with recognized expertise in the area of administering and implementing educational projects, Alianza Educativa (Educational Alliance) and the Fundación Antonio Puerto.
The number of public and private organizations working together makes this project a pioneer in its kind; despite the fact that there are similar experiences in other regions of Colombia and the department of Boyacá. However, the great merit and in turn, the key step of the Gutierrez experience was the five entities agreeing on timings, wills and effort in working in this geographical area, given its precarious academic conditions, infrastructure and the worsening of fundamental rights of children and youths in the area, especially the right to receive a quality education.
The project, which is preparing to begin its second year of the three planned, started with the diagnosis of the state of the art in each of the municipalities, in both academic as well as physical terms for which reason the results of Saber and Icfes tests, the high impact on student life in the country and the observations during visits to each of the sites were considered.
With the permanent presence of the operators, from installing a team of educational advisers in the area and opening the physical headquarters in Panqueba, each of the programs kicked off with workshops with teachers, managers, students and parents. These had different approaches but all had the goal of socializing the project and creating links between each of the members of the local communities and each of the individual municipalities.
With the implementation of productive projects, such as raising chickens, sheep and pigs as well as growing basic food crops in school gardens and in many home gardens, a social and economic environment was generated allowing the entire student and family community to think as a group and strengthen their social ties. Although this was fairly productive in the first instance it was unsustainable; however, it did provide major lessons for future experiences that will be defined for the second stage.
Given the conditions of the alliance between BBVA and Unicef, allowing the latter to receive contributions from the financial institution’s customers that has enabled about 2,000 million pesos to be collected over more than a year and a half, 190 million pesos were used to purchase equipment such as boards, chairs, tables and desks for the 109 sites in the province and 200 million, as a second contribution by BBVA to the initiative.
Now, when the academic and logistical preparations to start the second phase of the project are ready, the 5,000+ people making up the student community in the province are eager to see new teams of operators come with their materials to resume the work of this experience, whose first results offers positive signs on restituting rights, improving school/community relations, optimizing pedagogical processes and in particular improving family relationships between parents and children who have been marked by long-term abuse.
There is still a lot to be done, and the remaining two years of implementing the project will comprise work, effort and a great deal of dedication in what will surely, as experts say on the subject matter “not manage to do much”, but there is the certainty that its own development will be useful to gain experience in this type of initiative and the beneficiaries will have had the opportunity to observe different institutions of national life near them, which are interested in their region, their education and their future.
BBVA Colombia’s participation in this project represents one of the key objectives in its Corporate Responsibility Plan as is the case of influencing public education policies from fundamental support and sustainability measures. This is a task in which, in addition to having a contribution of 4,300 million pesos for 2010, it hopes to continue to invest over 10,000 million pesos in the next three years to support education, culture and sport for underprivileged children and youths throughout the country.
