Ministry of Education: Public-Private Partnerships

Meeting with the staff of the Office of International Cooperation

After spending yesterday morning learning about the abundance of activities and reforms being undertaken at the Ministry of Education, our group broke into smaller working clusters and met with officials from the specific areas in which we had personal interests. I chose to visit with the office responsible for cultivating and managing public-private partnerships. I have always been interested in how governments work with NGOs in developing country contexts, given the well known challenges with coordination between diverse agencies and organizations. Recently, however, I have added partnerships with businesses and private sector engagement to my list of interests. Today turned out to be my lucky day, because the session my group attended with Natalia Jaramillo and her colleagues in the Office for International Cooperation was a highly informative and inspiring discussion.

We began by learning about some of the partnerships and cooperative programs that are taking place throughout Colombia. The team spoke passionately about how willing the business community is to contribute to the educational development of Colombia; what is needed is more cooperation and alignment with the government's priorities to ensure that programs, once implemented, are sustainable and justly distributed. One way in which the business sector attempts to meet this objective is through the organization Entrepreneurs in Education, which has been a strong and reliable partner to the Ministry. Through this collaboration, as well as various other partnerships, the Ministry seeks to channel resources and energy into the projects that are most pressing. Due to the floods that have destroyed many schools over the past year, resources now need to be channeled into the schools and communities that were hard hit by the rains and flooding. There are 330 schools that need to be reconstructed, and the private sector is assisting greatly with repairing and improving those schools.

Additionally, this office has been working diligently on securing private funding in support of the Ministry's goal of improving Colombia's standing in several international assessments. First, they are working to procure funding for a consulting plan to determine strategic areas in which the Ministry should focus in order to improve the quality of education nationally. Additionally, they have partnered with HP to obtain computers for classrooms, with the national universities to improve the quality of secondary education, with water and oil companies to direct their philanthropic endeavors toward priority areas in education, and with NGOs to improve the quality and provision of service in early childhood schools and centers.

In sum, the Office of International Cooperation is at the forefront of forging mutually beneficial partnerships with local and international entities to benefit the youth of Colombia. In this day of global emphasis on accountability and reform, it would be difficult to find too many people who would wholly discount the role of the private sector in improving education. In Colombia, it would appear that the Ministry has not only accepted this partnership as inevitable, but has also made great strides to ensure that the partnership between both entities is collaborative, focused and sustainable.

Samantha Williams