Deepening Enseña por Colombia’s Impact

Donor: Morgan Chase Foundation
Local Ally: Enseña por Colombia 
Beneficiaries: 56 individuals
Location: Urabá, Bogotá, and Vichada

For the execution of this project Give To Colombia partnered with its local ally, Enseña por Colombia, an organization that seeks to improve Colombian students’ academic performance by including human capital of the highest quality to the Colombian educational system. The main premise of their work is that the single-most important factor in guaranteeing a significant impact on the academic performance of students is not class size, students’ attendance rate, or the amount of public expenditure per student, but the quality of teachers. 

With this goal in mind, their training methodology provides participants with the tools, abilities, and skills needed to not only prepare them for their teaching experience, but also to allow them to become high-quality teachers capable of effecting positive transformations in the classroom, as well as positive social change in the communities in which they are teaching. This training process is based on the “Teaching as Leadership” methodology developed by Teach for America, as Enseña por Colombia is part of the “Teach for All” global network, and was implemented in alliance with the Universidad de los Andes, the Fundación Escuela Nueva, and Asociación Alianza Educativa. 

During 2011 and 2012, thanks to the support of the JP Morgan Foundation, Enseña por Colombia undertook a process of recruiting, selecting, training, and placing 30 participants of the program, the first cohort of teachers, to make a significant impact on the lives of more than 6,000 children and teenagers of low-income community schools. 

During the second semester of 2012, 56 teachers were selected to be part of the “Transformational Leaders” movement within Enseña por Colombia. These 56 new teachers that joined Enseña por Colombia’s program thanks to the support of JP Morgan began teaching in 2013, which means that they had an impact on more than 11,800 children in the areas of Urabá, Bogotá, and Vichada