Women’s Unpaid Labor Is a Policy and Practice Issue—Bogotá Shows Us How By Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Women’s Unpaid Labor Is a Policy and Practice Issue—Bogotá Shows Us How

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 23, 2026

Rachel Cohen’s December 5, 2025 Vox piece makes something unmistakably clear: women’s unpaid labor is not simply a feminist concern—it is a policy failure. In Bogotá, Colombia, city leaders are doing what few governments have dared to do: naming care work, measuring it, and building public infrastructure around it.

Women in Bogotá perform more than 35 billion hours of unpaid care work each year, labor worth over one-fifth of Colombia’s GDP. Nearly 1.2 million women dedicate ten or more hours a day to caring for children, elders, and family members—often after long commutes to paid care jobs. This is not a marginal issue. It is the hidden engine of the economy.

Bogotá’s response has been bold. Through manzanas del cuidado—neighborhood care blocks—women can access job training, legal aid, health services, laundry facilities, and even rest, while their loved ones receive care on site. The goal is not charity. It is time: time to heal, learn, work, or simply breathe.

What makes this model transformative is that it centers caregivers, not just care recipients. Care is treated as shared responsibility—across families, communities, employers, and the state. As one sign in a care block declares: Cuidar no es ayudar, es corresponsabilidad. To care is not to help; it is co-responsibility.

This didn’t happen by accident. Colombia legally required the state to measure unpaid labor. Women’s movements—often forged through grief, resistance, and collective survival—created the political will to act. When Bogotá’s feminist mayor, Claudia López, launched the care system, she embedded it deeply enough that even her centrist successor expanded it.

The system is not perfect. Funding gaps remain, and many women still struggle to access services. But Bogotá has done something rare: it has made women’s invisible labor visible—and treated it as a public obligation.

In the United States, we continue to privatize care while praising women’s “resilience.” Families are expected to manage impossible burdens alone, even as public supports are stripped away. Bogotá reminds us that exhaustion is not a personal failure—it is a policy and practice choice.

Women’s unpaid labor has always sustained society. Bogotá simply had the courage to build policy around that truth. I love all the smiles in the photos.😊

What happens when a city takes women’s unpaid work seriously?
Rachel Cohen | Box
Fri, December 5, 2025 at 5:00 AM CST


Blanca Liliana Rodríguez and her sons, Zoran Andrey Vargas and Sergio Paolo Vargas Granada.

In Bogotá’s historic downtown, a modest government building sits in the shadow of a gilded statue of Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberator who freed much of South America from Spanish rule. Inside, on the fourth floor, a manzana del cuidado, or care block, pulses with a different kind of revolution.

On a bright October morning, a circle of small children sat around a turquoise table, wide-eyed as their teacher read a Halloween story. In another room, a group of mothers and grandmothers bent over glass jars and wicks, learning to turn used containers into candles during a recycling workshop led by an official from the city’s environmental division. In the main hall, a half dozen women in sneakers and leggings followed an instructor’s aerobics routine, laughing as they stretched and lunged.


Elizabeth Arias reads to a table of children. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

This space is one of 25 neighborhood hubs that have opened across Colombia’s capital since 2020, all part of an ambitious citywide effort to tackle “time poverty” — the lack of time for anything beyond the crushing, invisible burden of unpaid care work that falls overwhelmingly on women.

In Bogotá, a city of 8 million people, nearly 4 million women do some form of unpaid care work, and about 1.2 million dedicate most of their time to it, meaning 10 hours a day or more. Many commute for hours to reach paid care jobs, only to return home and do more unpaid care.

Key takeaways

Women in Bogotá provide over 35 billion hours of unpaid care work annually — totaling more than one-fifth of Colombia’s GDP.

Partly to address this, Bogotá is pioneering “care blocks,” neighborhood hubs where women can access free laundry, legal aid, job training, mental health services, and more while their children or elderly relatives receive care on site. The city has opened 25 care blocks since 2020.

The model is spreading globally. A US city is expected to join in 2026.

At a care block, a woman can access a variety of services while the person she cares for is looked after by teachers and staff nearby. She can hand off her laundry to an attendant, finish her schooling, meet with a lawyer, consult a psychologist, or learn job skills. The scope of activities is not limited to errands, either: she can also read a novel, catch up with friends, or just get some rest. And the system extends beyond the physical blocks — mobile buses bring comprehensive services to rural areas, and an at-home program targets caregivers who support those with severe disabilities and therefore cannot leave their houses.

Bogotá is trying to do something tricky: elevate both care work and caregivers, while also saying, “You shouldn’t have to be doing this so much — you deserve a full life beyond caring for kids, for aging relatives, for your partner.“


A multi-use building which includes a care block and laundromat for caregivers. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

Understanding how Bogotá built its care system — and the challenges it faces — offers a template for other cities. And indeed, what started as a local experiment is now gaining traction internationally. Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, expects to open its first care block by this year’s end. Guadalajara in Mexico approved funding for several “care communities” earlier this summer, and care blocks are already operating in Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. Activists and public health officials in England are trying to adapt the model, and a funder is even seeking to pilot care blocks in an American city in 2026.

The novel idea is putting caregivers — not just care recipients — at the center of policy, says Ai-jen Poo, a leading voice in the US care work movement and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Poo traveled to Bogotá in 2023 to learn more and said the program “blew her mind.” Before the pandemic, she added, most people didn’t identify as caregivers per se — even if they saw themselves as moms, parents, children.

“What could be the next big breakthrough is cities putting the idea of a caregiver and intergenerational care at the center of how you design access to services,” Poo said. “That’s the future.”

Behind Bogotá’s care revolution is a women’s movement with teeth.

In 2010, Colombia became the first country to legally require that its government quantify how much unpaid work was being done and by whom. The initial time-use survey, conducted in 2012, found that caregivers provided more than 35 billion hours of labor each year, amounting to more than one-fifth of the country’s GDP. Women did 80 percent of that work.The political will to do something about those statistics started to build. One movement bolstering women in the city was the Mothers of False Positives, led by women whose sons had been killed by the military in the mid-2000s; the military then falsely presented these men as guerrilla fighters to inflate its own body counts. The mothers transformed their grief into a public reckoning, marching, testifying, and demanding justice — reframing the work of motherhood itself as a form of political resistance.

Bogotá’s social landscape made space for that kind of organizing. Decades of civil war and displacement had reshaped the city, creating an openness to more fluid household structures. Extended families are common, with grandmothers, aunts, and sisters raising children together, often out of necessity. Single mothers aren’t whispered about as moral failures like they sometimes are in the US.


Iglesia San Ignacio (Church of Saint Ignatius) in the historic La Candelaria district of Bogotá, Colombia.

All these factors paved the way for Claudia López’s 2019 mayoral campaign. Lopez had already built a reputation as an anti-corruption crusader who unapologetically centered gender equity. The then-49-year-old ran as an openly gay woman in a Catholic country, aiming to become both Bogotá’s first female and its first LGBTQ mayor — and won with 35 percent of the vote in a tight four-way race.

“The women’s vote was crucial in setting the stage for this,” Ai-jen Poo recalled. “And they were ready with their economic priorities and gave the mayor a mandate, if not the actual solution.”Care blocks, the signature policy of López’s administration, are built around the “3 Rs”: recognize, redistribute, and reduce. Recognize that care work is real work that sustains society. Redistribute it — not just between women and men, but to care recipients when able, and to the state, employers, and communities. And reduce the overall burden so individual caregivers aren’t consumed by it.


Ana Maryory Franco, a beneficiary at the Santa Fé Care Block’s Reading Hall. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

López launched this District of Care System in 2020 through an executive decree, which gave her the authority to create the programs but also meant any future mayor could undo them just as easily. The initiative was allocated 5.2 trillion pesos (about US $1.3 billion) in the city’s 2020–24 development plan — much of it from reallocating existing service budgets and cost savings from turning single-use public facilities into new multi-purpose hubs. López’s administration later helped pass a law through the city council requiring different agencies to fund and run the care system. Unlike a decree, the law couldn’t be undone by a future mayor alone.

Colombia bars mayors from running for consecutive re-election, so as Lopez’s term neared its end, no one knew whether the next leader would continue her signature policy.

Her successor, Carlos Fernando Galán, couldn’t have been more different. The son of Luis Carlos Galán — a presidential candidate assassinated in 1989 for confronting narco-politics and corruption — the younger Galán billed himself as a centrist technocrat focused on fiscal responsibility and data-driven governance. In 2023, he won on a platform of public safety and restoring trust in government, far from Lopez’s more liberal and feminist message.


Carlos Fernando Galán, mayor of Bogotá, Colombia.

Galán could have pushed to end the care blocks. But the system had momentum, having earned international attention from the United Nations, funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies for its at-home assistance component, and praise from leaders around the world. All this made it easy for Galán to ride the goodwill and claim credit for the accolades his city kept earning for running programs in spaces most people would never expect.

For 14 years, El Castillo was one of Bogotá’s most notorious brothels—a place where businessmen, mobsters, and foreign clients paid for access to its VIP floors. Its ties to drug trafficking networks made it the target of a 2017 raid, after which the building sat abandoned for three years.

In 2020, the city converted the facility into the Castillo de las Artes — the Castle of the Arts — a cultural hub and care block.

Lebeb Infante, the care block’s director, was matter-of-fact about Castillo’s history and unapologetic about its current clients. “This neighborhood has the highest concentration of sex workers in the locality,” she said. “Many of them are caregivers — they have children, they’re supporting families. We also have a huge migrant population, people fleeing violence in Venezuela and rural Colombia. So the services here have to work differently.”


Elizabeth Arias and her class walk through the lobby of the Santa Fé Care Block. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

Offerings must account not only for gender, but for immigration status, which means helping people navigate bureaucracy when they don’t have papers or IDs and need to get certified for work or enroll in school. This particular block has two laundromats instead of one, plus a free clothing closet. “If someone needs pants to go to a job interview, we give them pants,” Infante explained.

El Castillo is also home to an El Arte de Cuidarte, or Art of Care center — the child care component that exists in every care block across the city.

On the day I visited, children’s voices rang out from behind an arched doorway. Streamers in purple and green — Halloween decorations — hung from the ceiling. Like any preschool classroom, it was bright and chaotic, with walls covered in artwork and educational posters.





The Art of Care programs serve a wider age range than traditional daycare, welcoming children from 11 months to 11 years old. Bogotá already has a robust public daycare system: free centers have existed since 1968, managed by the national child welfare agency and the city’s social integration office. These care block programs have a more specific purpose: free up time for caregivers so they can prioritize services, both for long-term goals and their immediate needs.

Parents don’t just drop off their children and leave to run errands all across the city. Many of the errands can be completed right there on site. One of the key challenges for caregivers dealing with “time poverty” is finding space in their day for anything else — their own health concerns or new credentials that could put them on a more secure financial footing. The Art of Care tries to eliminate some of that friction.


Juliana Martínez Londoño, the deputy secretary of Bogotá’s Women’s Secretariat.

Juliana Martínez Londoño, the deputy secretary of Bogotá’s Women’s Secretariat, emphasized that the Art of Care was not meant to compete with the city’s existing daycare infrastructure.“But the Art of Care is much more flexible,” she said. “It can be mobile, it can adapt to different schedules, it can go where caregivers are.”

An even more ambitious vision for the future of child care comes from Camila Gómez, the director of Bogotá’s citywide care initiative. She imagines 24-hour mobile child care centers for women who work night shifts, like bus drivers or recyclers who sort trash before dawn. The service could be more widely available, coming to a university student on exam day, or an employee whose company would pay for the service and get a tax break in return. “The goal is to not limit the Art of Care to people who are taking services at the care block,” Gómez said. “We want to make it for anybody who needs it.”


Camila Gómez, the director of Bogotá’s citywide care initiative. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

My trip overlapped with a citywide graduation ceremony for women who had completed month-long trainings in topics such as digital literacy, entrepreneurship, or professional caregiving.

The auditorium was packed with caregivers in purple graduation gowns and caps. Some had brought their children, who squirmed in seats or played quietly in the aisles. Others had wanted to come but couldn’t make it work, still home caring for someone who needed them.

One hundred and twenty-seven women were graduating that day. Many were over 65. For some, this was the first time they’d ever graduated from anything. The crowd sang along to the city’s anthem — “Bogotá! Bogotá! Bogotá!” — and women smiled proudly as they walked across the stage to receive their certificates.


Maria Diana Vergel Ramirez, Gladys Cecilia Bastidas Chavarro, Blanca Lilia Aguirre Morales, and Diana Janneth Diaz Rugeles all graduating with vocational training certificates.

The mayor and many of his high-ranking staff had come to congratulate the women. “You have to bet on their autonomy,” Laura Tami, the city’s Women’s Secretariat, said from the stage. Galán also laid out the administration’s strategy: freeing more women from violence, including economic violence, by giving them the tools to become more independent. It was a notably feminist message from a mayor who had run as a centrist technocrat.


Maria Isabel Gonzalez Zuñiga at the graduation ceremony.


Nohora Esperanza Giglioli Bernal just before graduating.


Laura Tami, the city’s Women’s Secretariat, and Carlos Fernando Galán, the mayor of Bogotá, cheer in front of the new graduates. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

The ceremony was moving, but it also raised real questions about scale. Over 3,500 women have completed these 30-day training programs, and the city hopes to increase that number to 9,000. This would be progress, but it’s a small fraction of Bogotá’s 1.2 million full-time caregivers.

Plus, my conversations at different care blocks surfaced the same challenge over and over. Many caregivers just didn’t know that these supports existed. And plenty who did didn’t trust them and didn’t believe Bogotá would actually keep them running, or that the services would actually be free. Some had shown up to care blocks looking for food and had been turned away empty-handed.


A gilded statue of Simón Bolívar in a Bogotá square.

“We really do need to work harder on spreading the word [and] improving trust,” said Jason Díaz, the manager of the laundry services at the San Cristóbal care block. “There is a lot of stigma with government institutions.”

And sometimes the services are just not enough. Blanca Liliana Rodríguez told me about the at-home assistance program her family had benefited from last year. Rodríguez cares for her two adult sons — one with physical disabilities, one with mental disabilities — plus her 77-year-old mother and her 82-year-old father-in-law, who lives elsewhere. She’d been cooking three meals a day for her father-in-law and delivering them to his house.

The psychologists who came through as part of the government program worked with her family for three months, teaching Rodríguez and her sons how to communicate better, and even leading couples therapy with one of her sons and his girlfriend. They helped her realize she was taking on far more than she needed to. Her sons started helping with cleaning and picking up medications and she joined a new WhatsApp group with 30 other caregivers in her neighborhood that remains active to this day.

But when the time-limited services ended, Rodríguez was on her own again, still overwhelmed by the sheer scope of what she was managing. “Three months is definitely not enough time for the at-home assistance program,” she told me.


Blanca Liliana Rodríguez in her home. | Juanita Escobar for Vox

The city officials accompanying me on the visit immediately defended the short timeline. The program, they emphasized, was intentionally brief — designed to “install capacity” in caregivers and make them more resilient. It felt a bit like PR for a funding problem, not to mention condescending — these women were already extraordinarily resilient. They were just dealing with their own health and financial problems, their own exhaustion. Rodríguez said her memory had been getting worse.

At the beginning of this year, Bogotá stopped administering the at-home assistance program that had helped Rodríguez and her family. The Bloomberg funding that had supported the services had run out, and Galán’s team hadn’t figured out how to keep paying for it, let alone scale it up.An independent evaluation, conducted over the last two years, found that the at-home program had freed up over 18,000 hours for caregivers and reduced their daily unpaid care work by more than an hour. Half of the caregivers reported feeling less burdened, and nearly half of people with disabilities became more independent.

But it was expensive. So the city tested a cheaper model, moving some therapeutic services into the care blocks rather than delivering everything at home. The new hybrid model cut costs per participant by 57 percent while still reducing caregiver depression and anxiety.

When I asked Galán’s administration whether the city would resume its at-home programming, Tami, the women’s secretary, responded that they planned to restart services next year. The city aims to run both models: full at-home assistance for caregivers who truly can’t leave their houses, and the lower-cost hybrid for others.

Meanwhile, Galán has continued expanding the less expensive parts of the care system. His team opened two new care blocks this year and added programming like nature therapy sessions run by the city’s botanical garden.

James Anderson, who leads the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, told me that he expects the care block idea to expand further around the world, and that the United Nations Development Programme has been working actively behind the scenes to help. At a 2024 Bloomberg event in Mexico City last year, more than 70 mayors toured the city’s own version of care blocks, known as Utopías, and showed “incredible interest.”

 

Bogotá, Colombia | Juanita Escobar for Vox

Anderson thinks the model could follow the trajectory of climate action planning. Before 2005, he pointed out, mayors didn’t talk specifically about “climate”: they had water projects, sanitation projects, housing projects, all run by different agencies with no coordination. Twenty years later, every major city has a climate action plan that coordinates efforts across city hall. “That’s the trajectory that I imagine this issue will travel,” he said.

That vision is already underway. CHANGE, the City Hub and Network for Gender Equity, is a global network of city governments led by former mayoral staffers in London and Los Angeles. They’ve been working to spread the Bogotá model, developing an implementation guide and planning workshops for interested cities. Currently, they’re coordinating with a team in greater Manchester in England, have been helping Freetown in West Africa, and are actively involved in identifying a US city for a pilot next year, though conscious of the growing American backlash to anything associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“If you can’t make the case for why this won’t make your dollar stretch, there’s no point in having the conversation,” said Leslie Crosdale, CHANGE’s co-executive director. “It’s an efficient system and makes your city more resilient.”

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown, credits both CHANGE and Claudia López with helping kick off the idea in her city. Their care block is expected to launch by mid-2026, and in the meantime, Freetown is opening three temporary spaces before the end of December to meet demand from women in the community. “What excited me was being able to give back an opportunity that many women lost—the opportunity for education, the opportunity to just get health care,” Aki-Sawyerr told me.

Ai-jen Poo, who leads the National Domestic Workers Alliance, pointed to a disconnect in the US, where cultural expectations assume families can manage needs independently, despite millions being nowhere close to affording enough care. “You have this mismatch between the infrastructure and the reality where the individual family is just bearing the brunt in an impossible situation,” she said. “I think there’s a use case in the US for care blocks. It probably won’t look exactly the same, but I do think that there’s a lot there.”

Jason Díaz manages laundry services at the San Cristóbal care block.

Back in Bogotá, Jason Díaz, the 36-year-old manager of laundry services at the San Cristóbal care block, offered a glimpse of what that could look like in practice. He told me his job had made him more sensitive, more humane, teaching him to slow down more, and notice when someone needs help before they ask. “You learn to do it everywhere — at home, on the street,” he said. “It teaches you how to help people without expecting anything in return. The important thing is to be part of the solution.”

At the Castillo de las Artes care block, a sign hung on the wall in bright purple and green: “Cuidar no es ayudar, es corresponsabilidad.” To care is not to help; it is co-responsibility.

Spanish-English interpretation for reporting was conducted by Catalina Hernandez. This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Escuela Nueva Has Transformed Rural Education in Colombia and Now Founder Vicky Colbert Is Expanding Her Methodology Across the Globe

This is a great story about "Escuela Nueva" ("New School"), an award-winning model of schooling in rural Colombia founded by Vicky Colbert who has become an international rock star in education. I read this very closely to get a sense of what makes her model tick such that even urban contexts are adopting it. From what I can tell, it's partnership-based, learner-centered, sensory-rich, asset- and values-based, centered around such core values as expressed herein:

"At its best, Escuela Nueva aims to instill values — responsibility, tolerance, discipline, community — as much as academics. Due to the small class sizes and multi-grade classrooms (known as 'multigrados' in Colombia) common in rural areas, there are always a few students who finish their lessons first and a few that lag behind."

In a conversational and dialogical manner, Escuela Nueva cultivates such values of citizenship as leadership and autonomy that in turn occur through a strong focus on student government, as well as student “'work committees' that can include categories like sports and recreation, the environment, and even cleaning. Each group consists of a few representatives who plan events and activities."

With the help of Escuela Nueva's signature workbooks, I would guess, the teachers' role is primarily that of coach with teachers mentoring each other and meetings consisting more about "mentorship and open discussion" than detailed course planning. Though the schools appear to do well on standardized tests, test-prep is not their focus.

Rural education is a challenge everywhere and Vicky Colbert is making a huge difference. My main question is the role of culturally relevant, perhaps Indigenous or rural education. Are they educating children to ultimately leave the rural areas or to strengthen the local economies so that at least some students will remain in them and develop them. What specifically does the curriculum consist of?

Colbert's influences that have found their way into Escuela Nueva's teaching an curriculum, specifically, Montessori, John Dewey, and Vygotsky, certainly suggest learner-centered, experience-based, and socioculturally focused theoretical elements that appear to be making a difference.

Do read this in its entirety as it definitely has elements like teamwork and multiage grading, personalized learning, and student autonomy and leadership that we can apply here in the Texas and the U.S.

Thanks to my colleague, Tony Baez, for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela


Escuela Nueva Has Transformed Rural Education in Colombia and Now Founder Vicky Colbert Is Expanding Her Methodology Across the Globe

Posted On December 1, 2017
By : Jared Wade


Vicky Colbert has spent more than 40 years building an acclaimed model for rural education in Colombia. Now, she has another $3.9 Million USD in funding from the Yidan Prize to support even more global growth for Escuela Nueva as the revolutionary learning methodology pushes into Africa and Asia.

For more than four decades, Vicky Colbert has dedicated herself to improving rural education. Her work began in the 1970s, when the situation in her native Colombia was grim. Guerrilla conflict and disorder had already become the prevailing reality in many areas and, combined with scarce resources and under-development, millions of children were entering adulthood without the knowledge and skills to make a decent living.

Vicky Colbert, founder of Fundación Escuela Nueva, was the first recipient of the Yidan Prize for Educational Development. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Colbert was young and idealistic. Blond and fair-skinned, the Bogotá-born sociologist wanted to make a difference. She studied at top schools and worked to find solutions. As things progressed, she started to see a new path forward.

But back then, even on her most ambitious days, Colbert never envisioned just how much impact she would eventually make.

While she has had many successes, the latest came in the form of the Yidan Prize for Educational Development. This educational honor was awarded for the first time this year and is already among the world’s most lucrative education awards, giving Colbert and her Escuela Nueva Foundation roughly $3.9 million USD in funding — a massive windfall in a realm where the budgets and grant money are never enough.

This is far from the first award for Colbert or Escuela Nueva (“New School”), which has become an internationally acclaimed teaching model whose principles have been adopted in more than a dozen countries since it has proven its worth in Colombia.

In 2005, she earned the first-ever Clinton Global Citizen Award, a prestigious honor now given out annually by the foundation of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She later won the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Prize in 2009 — the first time that the Qatar Foundation handed out its global education prize.

It seems that whenever a new prominent global recognition is created, Colbert’s name tops the list. And so it was this year for the new Yidan Prize created by Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist Charles Chen Yidan.

Yidan has said that one reason education is close to his heart is because his grandmother never learned to read. It took just two generations of studious learning, however, for the family to watch Chen not only earn degrees in applied chemistry and economic law but use his knowledge to help develop one of the globe’s biggest companies. With no need to work any longer, the billionaire co-founder of conglomerate Tencent wanted to use his money to help fund education.

Colbert was the perfect recipients for the inaugural award. On top of the work her foundation has done in Colombia, Dorothy Gordon, head of the Yidan Prize judging panel, praised Escuela Nueva for continuing to expand to other areas of the world. Gordon was impress with how “this model has spread, making small, under-resourced rural schools effective in many Latin American nations.”

A typical Escuela Nueva classroom, featuring students of two grade levels sitting in group desks and actively working through their lessons. (Credit: Jared Wade)

The Escuela Nueva Methodology

Escuela Nueva is a learning methodology. In scholarly circles, it would be referred to as a pedagogy, and the method is based upon several core principles that have elevated it into a global standard of excellence.

At its best, Escuela Nueva aims to instill values — responsibility, tolerance, discipline, community — as much as academics. Due to the small class sizes and multi-grade classrooms (known as “multigrados” in Colombia) common in rural areas, there are always a few students who finish their lessons first and a few that lag behind.

This is common the world over, and Escuela Nueva confronts this fact with a collaborative approach. It promotes teamwork through ongoing open dialogue and hexagonal worktables that force children to face one another. The design encourages the quick-finishers to assist their peers. In this way, normal human social dynamics allow for leaders to develop and students to view collective problem solving as the default way to complete a task.

Vicky Colbert, during a recent interview in her humble Bogotá office, said she believes the benefits of this approach are even more pronounced in the modern era. Almost all professions require people to work together on projects with people from different backgrounds, different intelligence levels, and different disciplines. The Escuela Nueva style sets children up to operate this way from a very early age. And she says these are the skills useful in the workplaces of today — not being able to retain information dictated in long lectures, memorize book facts, and prove yourself once every two months on an end-all-be-all test that will define success or failure.

Tests are of course a part of the Escuela Nueva methodology. It is not some new-age alternative learning experience. And the curriculum is not revolutionary. The signature workbooks contain the same information and exercises expected in any elementary school lesson plan. Perhaps more than almost anything, these simple workbooks are critical to Escuela Nueva’s success.


The Escuela Nueva workbooks have been essential for helping the program scale to 20,000 rural schools and promoting student-centered learning in the classroom. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Colbert initially created the workbooks as a rudimentary how-to guide for teachers but they have changed over the years — with the help of government planners — to serve as a functional roadmap that can walk children through their entire academic year. “She has transformed conventional, teacher-centered schooling practices to a new learner-centered model,” said Gordon of the Yidan Prize judging panel.

Teachers don’t just sit back and watch the students fill in the books, however. They explore the materials together and discuss the themes in a way that resembles a conversation more than a series of instructions. “I think the real role of a teacher,” said Colbert, “is to be a good coach, to stimulate your students, to know their strengths, to know their weaknesses. It’s not to spend so much time giving information. Information comes packaged in so many other ways now.”

From her office in Bogotá, which is cluttered with medals, international prizes, and photos of Colbert alongside the likes of Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, she continued to stress the essential importance of this concept. “We’re going from the transmission of knowledge to the social construction of knowledge,” she said. “So it’s promoting more child-centered learning, personalized learning. Not everybody learns the same thing at the same time. There are different learning rhythms. You construct knowledge together through dialogue and interaction, but you have to have instruments and strategies to do it right. So, if you do child-centered education without having materials or mechanisms, it’s just theory.”

For all its good ideas — and even despite its name — Colbert admits that Escuela Nueva is nothing new. When it comes to theory, it is mostly still just a means of teaching young people the same type of knowledge that kids have been learning for the past century all over the world.

“I’m not an inventor starting an idea,” she said, citing the pioneering efforts of Dr. Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Lev Vygotsky. “I had to build on what already existed…We know the theory — but the theory only comes to the elite schools in our regions, not the poorest of the poor schools.”

At her core, Colbert is a pragmatist. She is enthusiastic about the high-minded values and community-based aspects of Escuela Nueva, but ultimately describes it simply as a “proven solution to improve quality education.”

Since the beginning, Colbert had her eye on creating something that would remain viable in three ways: technically, politically, and financially. Technically meant that it must be easy to implement and teach. Financially meant it couldn’t be too expensive. And politically meant navigating labor union issues and surviving the whims of the election cycle.

“Anything we did, we could do in the 34,000 rural schools in Colombia,” said Colbert. More than even the methods themselves, impact and scale were the foundation of Escuela Nueva. “From the outset, we wanted to influence national policy — not to have just a nice little project.”

Beryl Levinger, who says elements of the educational principles she helped craft decades ago in Colombia alongside Colbert are still in use at Middlebury College in the United States, credits the Fundacion Escuela Nueva fonder for always remaining focused on this vision. “We created a pedagogy,” Levinger said in an interview with Middlebury. “But it was Vicky who became a vocal advocate for this methodology and transformed it into a worldwide movement.”


Two young students enjoy some recess time during their school day at Sede Barragán, a rural school in Quindio where four teachers lead Escuela Nueva lessons for around 80 kids across six grade levels. (Credit: Jared Wade)

A Good Idea Becomes National Policy

As someone who started out as a sociologist, and earned a master’s degree from Stanford University, Vicky Colbert has always seen the educational journey as more than just a personal achievement. To her, it underpins everything. “Without quality, basic education, you cannot achieve anything,” said Colbert. “You cannot achieve social, economic, or cultural development — nor peace nor democracy. So we need quality, basic education. I’m totally convinced of that. Without quality, basic education it would be very difficult for a country to reach other goals.” 5

In the 1970s, public education in even the largest cities in Colombia was lacking. But she was more concerned about the rural areas that in many cases barely had functional classrooms. There was no guarantee of universal basic education from the government, and in the schools that were managing to operate, one teacher was likely overseeing dozens of children ranging from five to 13 years old. Nobody was doing anything about this deficiency. “There were many schools that were invisible to educational planners,” she said.

Fixing these issues was the genesis of Escuela Nueva, and something she realized she could do better outside of government than in the first role she held for a short time in the Colombian Ministry of Education. Colbert began developing the core principles along with a Colombian teacher named Óscar Mogollón and Beryl Levinger, who initially came to Colombia as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer and development worker before later becoming an international studies professor at Middlebury College.

Together, they started building on what already existed and trying to forge a consensus among different stakeholders in the country. “It wasn’t easy,’ said Colbert, but they eventually found funding for a pilot project in the three Andean regions of Cundinamarca, Boyacá, and Norte de Santander.

The results started to impress the decision-makers in Bogotá. In addition to performance score improvement, dropout rates fell and fewer kids were being held back to repeat grades. In time, the progress was undeniable, and the Escuela Nueva method became the national policy for rural education in all of Colombia. It was instituted into some 20,000 schools, and this monumental achievement created the momentum that took Escuela Nueva beyond the country’s borders.

It gained international acclaim after the World Bank, which had earlier provided a loan to help the program flourish in Colombia, in 1989 named Escuela Nueva as a global standard of successful educational innovation. The early indicators highlighted great potential and only looked better as time went on. One fact Colbert recites proudly is that, according to a 1998 study from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Colombia had risen to rank second, behind Cuba, in Latin America in terms of providing the best primary education to rural students. The study also showed that Colombia was a global outlier by having the bulk of its rural schools outperforming its urban schools.

As the word got out, countries from throughout the region — Brazil, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and more — started sending representatives to Colombia to see what everyone was raving about. More than a dozen nations would eventually adopt the methods to some degree. International organizations kept arriving as well, including more World Bank agencies, UNESCO, UNICEF, and USAID.

Colbert would become vice minister of education of Colombia in the early 1980s, which helped to further embed Escuela Nueva into the fabric of the nation. She would also work in a high-level leadership role in the region for UNESCO. But eventually she wanted to be home overseeing her life’s work because the climate of the country was changing.

Even more than the previous decade, the 1980s were a chaotic time in Colombia. Just as the rapid rise of the drug trade hit, there was also an increased push for decentralized government. With the nation becoming torn apart and local politics beginning to assert more influence, the nascent Foundation Escuela Nueva needed to retain the confidence of federal bureaucrats in Bogotá but also launch efforts to win over thousands of local mayors and officials. “It started becoming debilitated in some regions,” she said, “and stronger in others…I wanted to get back into the picture in Colombia, and not let Escuela Nueva fade.”

There was so much to be done and she believed her program was on the cusp of making even greater impact — just when war-torn Colombia needed it most. “We wanted to continue innovating,” she said. “We want to adapt it to new contexts and populations. We want to adapt it to the urban areas also. We want to adapt it for displaced children caused by our conflict.”


Isabela Blandon Bravo, the 11-year-old class president of Sede Barragán. Here, as at all Escuela Nueva schools, student government is considered fundamental to instilling leadership and autonomy in young students. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Escuela Nueva in the Real World

This focus on scalability — led by one individual’s tenacity — is what allowed Escuela Nueva to develop into a global model of success. The classroom style and underlying educational principles, however, are what most kids adore. Test scores and student retention rates in a spreadsheet can impress bureaucrats. But nothing that can match the smile on a proud child’s face.

There are plenty of teeth showing in an Escuela Nueva classroom, where accountability means students are in charge of keeping attendance. Rather than the teacher calling out names, the kids personally mark the calendar each morning when they arrive. If they miss a day, they get a note from their parents explaining the absence and put it in the “excuse” box.

A large priority is placed on student government. The children elect a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. Kids from the lower grades are encouraged to begin participating early and enthusiastically. The schools also set up “work committees” that can include categories like sports and recreation, the environment, and even cleaning. Each group consists of a few representatives who plan events and activities. From “peace week” and kite festivals to science fairs and tree-planting days, organizing the committee agenda aims to instill values and give more students a leadership role in the classroom community.

Ethics and respect for the community become more than platitudes. The children embrace these core values. The classroom aims to instill citizenship — not merely scholarship.

All of this is on display at a small school in Quindio, the nation’s smallest department (which is the equivalent of a state or province). Quindio has become an iconic symbol of Colombian coffee country, a gorgeous green and slope-filled Andean mountain region that has managed to largely sidestep the worst damage of the armed conflict. Though tourists now flock to the working coffee town of Salento to see how beans are harvested, Quindio remains sparsely developed apart from one modern highway that runs through the region. The bulk of the families living here are poor and subsist as campesinos, working land they don’t own to carve out a meager living.

According to the local government, 208 schools in Quindio employ the Escuela Nueva method, and the Yidan Prize organizers arranged a press visit there to show reporters two of these locations. One is called Sede Barragán, a school of around 80 kids located about 40 minutes outside the departmental capital of Armenia. Sitting among towering mountain peaks, multiple rivers, and tropical fruit farms, the building itself is modest, but colorful and designed in the style of the vibrant red, blue, and yellow structures typical in Salento.




Sede Barragán is small and, like many rural Colombian schools, lacks resources. But the students take great pride in their school, which features the colors and design typical of buildings throughout coffee country. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Isabela Blandon Bravo, an 11-year-old, is the class president of Sede Barrangán. She formerly went to school in Medellín and misses some things about the urban setting but has adjusted to rural life. She has become a leader who her classmates look up to, and Isabela’s dream is to become a doctor. She thinks she might like to practice medicine in another country one day. France currently stands as her top pick.

While she may never make it to Paris, she will soon be moving on. This school ends at sixth grade, so she will be transferring to a different location, probably one of the larger schools in Armenia that doesn’t use the same teaching methods. But even though Isabela will have to adapt, Alva Lucia Orozco, the school’s head teacher, expects her to thrive in any environment.

Orozco has seen the difference first hand. While she is now among Escuela Nueva’s biggest evangelists, she has been teaching at the same location for four decades — long before the methodology came to Sede Barragán. “I am a part of the furniture,” said Orozco. In her view, the kids who leave this building now are much better prepared for the real world than those who she taught in traditional ways.

Vicky Colbert explains it plainly. “The most important part is people working in teams,” said Colbert. “I think that’s one of the most outstanding 21st Century skills. So what we started 40 years ago, now it’s the type of education everybody wants.”

Orozco’s first job is teaching students, but she also instructs the school’s other teachers on how to adapt to the Escuela Nueva style. “We’ve learned that teachers learn better from other teachers,” she said. Going over educational philosophy is key, and she has watched her colleagues, including Gloria Morena Zuluaga, grow more comfortable over time. Monthly meetings focus more on mentorship and open discussion more than detailed course planning.

There is always some situation that needs to be fixed, and they work together, often with help from the students, to overcome obstacles. “Colombians are inventors,” said Zuluaga. “We have so many problems that we have to look for new solutions. Every time we see a problem, we see an answer.”

Zuluaga has worked at the school, teaching all subjects to the second and third graders, for four and a half years. Though she now loves the learning style, at the beginning she was thrilled to start working at Sede Barragán for one reason: because it was a seven-minute drive from her house as opposed to the 45-minute motorbike ride she formerly endured to her previous school.

Many of the students also live in the nearby small town of Caicedonia. Though close, it lies across the departmental line in Valle de Cauca, a department in western Colombia that is much more plagued by drug-trade violence and conflict. But whether their home life is wonderful or trying, Zuluaga says that the attitudes she sees from students in her Escuela Nueva classroom stand apart from what she typically witnessed at her old school. “The kids are autonomous, and they are happy,” she said.

While Zuluaga had some experience in Escuela Nueva before transferring into Sede Barragán, many teachers who arrive in a new location know nothing about it. Most adjust. Some struggle. This is why in-the-field teacher training is such a core principle of a method that above all else relies on the instructor buy-in.

If the average teacher cannot understand the methodology and work within a student-centric guidebook environment, the kids will suffer. Because there are few options in a rural community. “We have to work with the teachers that are there,” said Colbert. “We cannot have a Ph.D. in the middle of the jungle.” 9

The nearby Escuela Nueva school Sede Cabaña is so small that kids from first through sixth grade all share a single classroom. (Credit: Jared Wade)


Escuela Nueva Embraces Urban Planning

Since the early days of Escuela Nueva, the rural population of Colombia has shrunk in terms of percentage of people living outside the cities. Decades of guerrilla conflict, paramilitary violence, and drug trafficking pushed so many people out of their villages and farming communities. Some found better lives in cities. Many others now live in slums and impoverished communities on the outskirts of Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali.

Along with the more than 260,000 people killed during Colombia’s half-century of conflict, at least 7.7 million have been displaced, according to the UN Refugee Agency. This is the second largest figure in the world, behind Syria (with 12.2 million). By comparison, there are 4.7 million displaced Afghans and 4.2 million displaced Iraqis.

Demographic restructuring hasn’t diminished rural need, however. In many ways, Colbert sees serving the students of Quindio — and areas with even lower population density, like the Amazon and Pacific jungle department of Chocó — as more important than ever. “Colombia has become urbanized, so there are not so many children [in rural areas],” she said. “But, still, these schools require special treatment.”

But Escuela Nueva has been expanding and evolving. Colbert has pushed to adapt the methodology for the city environment with Escuela Activa Urbana, which looks to bring similar change to the millions of students packed into Colombia’s sprawling urban metropolises. This has been part of the foundation’s work for decades but it is now taking on increasing importance.

Otoniel Morales Benjumea now works with the local education ministry but formerly served as the principal of Escuela Normal Superior del Quindio, a secondary school that has employed Escuela Nueva techniques in Armenia. Home to around 300,000 people, the Quindio capital is a small city by Colombian standards, but Morales said it brought positive changes to his former school, particularly among the most troubled kids.

He recalls one period when Normal Superior took in six students who had been kicked out of other educational institutions. Some of these “street kids” took to the program and began to excel. These type of adolescents may lack formal education and classroom discipline, but the group structure of Escuela Nueva can be comforting. They are accustomed to a fast-paced, sensory-rich environment.

Lectures and memorization challenges bore them and add to the inferiority they feel in a formal academic world. But interactive, communal learning lets them display their interpersonal smarts and mental dexterity — to the teacher and, more importantly, to themselves. This fosters curiosity, said Morales, and a willingness to explore potentially uncomfortable workbook lessons.

Such experience taught him to stop looking at the arrival of a troubled kid as a new problem to manage. Instead, he began to view it as an opportunity to reach someone who had fallen through the traditional system. “We want to change the world with this project,” said Morales.


Vicky Colbert believes that Escuela Nueva never could have become such a success without great teachers like Gloria Morena Zuluaga of Sede Barragán. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Escuela Nueva’s Global Future

The experiences of Quindio highlight why educators throughout the world are looking to adopt Nueva Escuela principles. Vicky Colbert lights up when recalling how her philosophy spread to locations like Guatemala and Brazil in its early days. More recently, she has traveled to Mexico, and talked extensively with the governments of Vietnam, Chile, and Zambia, where technical assistance has been offered to set up a program.

These high-level discussions are the backbone of kickstarting programs in new countries due to the same impact and scalability dynamics she encountered in Colombia in the 1970s. But Colbert now also focuses on partnering with other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) when moving into new areas.

There are multiple reasons that this has been a better approach than setting up a local Escuela Nueva outpost. First, it simply cuts down on overhead and resources. While it would be great to have the foundation’s boots on the ground across the globe, funding can be better spent elsewhere.

Second comes political risk. Ultimately, partnering with federal governments is the way to have the biggest impact. They are the only ones in a country that can install a nationwide rollout. But the downside is much greater — a lesson Colbert learned in Brazil after the public officials who championed the program left office. 

Brazil’s administration turnover, mass corruption scandals, and budgetary nightmares in recent years haven’t fully curtailed the foundation’s efforts in the country. At least 10,000 schools in the Portuguese-speaking country, under the name “Escola Ativa,” have used Escuela Nueva methods. But collaborating with established local NGOs and other private sectors stakeholders gives Colbert more confidence. They have staying power. And this helps ensure that the hard work spent laying the foundation for new programs won’t stall out with the changing winds of the next election.

In Mexico, Escuela Nueva now works with Fundación Azteca. In Zambia, it works with the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed). “In the case of Brazil, I should have had an organization from the private sector to work with, because innovations are very vulnerable to political and administrative changes,” said Colbert.

Despite such concerns, these days, the work is now more about expanding intelligently than fighting to break down roadblocks. After more than four decades of development, the challenge is no longer about convincing people that Escuela Nueva works. It’s about keeping up with demand.

This is why Colbert was overjoyed when she got the call about winning the Yidan Prize and the $3.9 million USD in funding that comes along with it. She hopes this can serve as something of a seed-round investment that attracts even more resources and partnerships — including more public support within Colombia — to kickstart a new, even-grander era for Fundación Escuela Nueva.

The interest is certainly there. Even the biggest country on earth wants to get involved. “There has been so much interest in China. So much interest,” she said. “I’ve been invited almost every year to go to China because they’re very interested in the Escuela Nueva model, especially for the rural areas.”

Though she has other priorities, Colbert says she has been flattered that even U.S. states, including California and New Mexico, have come calling to partner with the organization. “We want to work with the poorest of the poor children in developing countries,” said Colbert.

At an age when most are looking forward to retirement, Colbert shows no signs of slowing down. Even though the long journey has taken Escuela Nueva beyond the wildest dreams of the wide-eyed young woman who set off for Stanford University in the 1970s, there is still has so much work to be done.

Colbert is eager to continue the mission. And best of all, she is no longer alone. There is a growing group of supporters and educators, in Colombia and throughout the world, working toward the same goal. “This is my life project — and not only mine,” said Colbert. “But it’s a collective life project of many wonderful teachers that have been with me for so many, many years.”

Related

Vicky Colbert Wins Prestigious Yidan Prize for Lifelong Educational Work in Colombia, December 14, 2017

Share your thoughts: About the Author

Jared Wade is editor in chief of Finance Colombia. He is a Bogotá-based journalist with 15 years of experience covering topics including business, financial services, Latin America, and sports. Email him at jared.wade(at) financecolombia.com or follow him on Twitter at @Jared_Wade.

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