Colombia’s Early Childhood Comprehensive Care Strategy (De Cero a Siempre, 2011) promotes quality and coverage of education and care for children from birth until five years of age. One of its initial aims was to ensure enrolment of 2 million 3-5 year-olds by 2018, and participation of all children in extreme poverty in early childcare programmes. The strategy promotes a holistic approach, with a strong emphasis on parental engagement and co-ordination of different services. A comprehensive ECEC framework defined the types of ECEC based on three modalities: family, community, and institutional. The family modality focused on support at home, targeting pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, or children in rural areas.
The strategy significantly increased enrolment in ECEC and the co-ordinated approach paved the way for Colombia’s education continuity strategy in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2019, some 1.4 million children under age five were enrolled in comprehensive ECEC, an increase from 566 400 children in 2010. The current target is to reach 2 million enrolments by 2022 (Government of Colombia, 2019[6]). Furthermore, after the closure of Early Childhood Development services in March 2020, the Colombian Institute of Family welfare (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, ICBF) launched My hands teach you (Mis manos te enseñan) to support continuous learning in the home, to ensure adequate nutrition for 0-5 year-olds, and to provide more comprehensive support to the most vulnerable families (e.g. distribution of food rations, pedagogical guides with activities and child-rearing practices, and materials to carry out the activities at home). This strategy made use of an interdisciplinary team of trained professionals including some 88 500 education agents, 47 200 community caregivers, and 6 000 psychological support specialists (Arbeláez et al., 2020[7]).
Further reading: OECD (2016[8]), Education in Colombia, Reviews of National Policies for Education, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264250604-en.