Along with the Ministry of Education, the Santo Domingo Foundation, and Educate A Child, a program of the Education Above All Foundation, we launched the campaign “Este Cuento es Tuyo” (This Story is Yours).

The campaign seeks to promote school access and permanence in Colombia for children to gradually achieve all grades while returning to school.

“Este Cuento es Tuyo” sends a message to families, communities, and actors in the education sector to promote access, well-being, and permanence in school. In particular, it calls on parents to enroll their children and support them throughout their development.

Through its messages, the campaign also reminds children and youth that participating in educational processes allows them to develop their abilities and talents, enrich their interests and criteria and, support them to build their life projects and become the main characters of their history.

Official commercial for the campaign Este Cuento es Tuyo (This Story is Yours)

Over 54,000 children will benefit from the campaign.

“Este Cuento es Tuyo” complements the efforts of the “Todos al Cole” project to promote school permanence, through 1) active search of the out-of-school children, 2) strengthening teaching practices, and 3) building classrooms in territories such as Chocó, Cartagena, Barranquilla, and la Guajira.

“Our commitment to the country’s children and young people is to move forward quickly with the gradual return to school to favor permanence. Coming back to school benefits children’s learning process, while guaranteeing their right to education, explains the Minister of Education, María Victoria Angulo, when presenting this campaign to ensure students remain in the system.

“Education has a significant impact on people’s lives; it is the most powerful tool to promote social mobility and equity,” said the Ministry of Education. For this reason, it seeks to guarantee relational, pedagogical, material, and social conditions for children and youth to feel recognized, respected, and welcomed, and can explore and perfect their skills and abilities that allow them to occupy the transcendental place that corresponds to them in the transformation of reality.

Both the campaign and the project seek to strengthen education

For Patricia Sierra, our executive director, “schools, are both learning spaces and protective places for children. Therefore, the closure of classrooms has affected students in the cognitive and socioemotional areas. Likewise, lags and dropout school cases have worsened due to the situation. Throughout the ‘Todos al Cole,’ we want to mitigate these problems, promote school permanence and strengthen public education because children are the future, but mostly, are the present”.

Both the campaign and the project seek to strengthen education comprehensively, that is, greater opportunities for access and better quality of learning for the nearly 10 million students enrolled in preschool, elementary and middle school.

“From the Santo Domingo Foundation, we are convinced that education is the way to build a more equitable country in which more people can provide welfare for their families. This initiative is a collective effort to face one of the greatest challenges that the pandemic has left us and that is to find ways for all children and adolescents to return to school in alternation,” concluded José Francisco Aguirre, executive director of the Santo Domingo Foundation.

Those interested in enrolling their sons, daughters, or relatives should contact the Secretary of Education of the territory where they are located. All the procedures of the official schools are free of charge and each Secretariat establishes a schedule and accompanies the activities related to the enrollment of students. To facilitate this process, a website was created for the campaign “Este Cuento es Tuyo”, where you can find out the points of attention, as well as information of interest about the enrollment process. For more information, go to http://www.estecuentoestuyo.com