Ensuring Early Childhood Development in Colombia & beyond

The Social Innovation

Magnitude of the Problem, and its Root Causes

Over 200 million children under the age of 5 around the world are not reaching their developmental potential due to the lack of ECD services. Latin American is among the areas with the lowest access to ECD Services; 56% of poor children in Colombia did not have access to ECD services when Nathalia started. 

aeioTU made a huge difference in the lives of the 30,000 children but wanted to change the situation for all the children in the country, and beyond, so they dreamed how to do it, and adjusted the strategy in that direction.

During their participation in the Re-imagine Learning Globalizer co-created by Ashoka and the Lego Foundation in 2016, the aeioTU team outlined the key factors contributing to 200 million+ children not having access to ECD services:

- lack of an overall strategy to prioritize ECD.
- lack of allocation of financial resources.
- lack of capacity of the human capital around the children, including families, communities and ECD center staff.  

To address these root causes of the problem, aeioTU has made it their mission to empower stakeholders around the Latin-American region by strategically mobilizing the field of early childhood development, and to work towards a world where all children have access to high quality ECD services.

Strategy to Catalyze a Network of Changemakers towards the Targeted Mission

The strategy included creating awareness about the ECD space, and building capacity of the system to provide high quality ECD services.

Some of the tactics they deployed towards the mission as a part of the strategy include:

1) Information/Knowledge Development and Sharing

Their team has been working on creating knowledge to support the development of skills and promote systemic change in communities with public and private partners. 

aeioTU engaged in international programs and networks like US National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), ProLEER and Reggio Children International Network for peer learning to ensure quality, share programs and write cases. 

Through all these experiences, they have built a digital platform: red.aeiotu.org, to create a global social learning community, where parents, caregivers, teachers, and educational organizations can share their experiences, knowledge, and practices to promote the full development of each child. 

2) Collaborating with Partners across sectors to forward the ECD agenda and Involve Teachers, Parents and Caregivers

Nathalia´s impact as a social entrepreneur has been to understand the role of aeioTU’s as a mobilizer of change for the children of the world, not just the children in the original community or the centers served directly.  

Having that vision and leadership, she assured that the aeioTU approach to ECD was a scalable solution, communicated her vision to all key stakeholders in the different ecosystems she works in, and has changed the paradigm from “us” to “all of us”.

They have worked to mobilize actors and organizations around the ECD agenda by promoting the participation of stakeholders across sectors including:
- 5 Presidencies (4-year period of each)- which includes the President’s office, Ministries of Health, Education, Culture, and social services. Key stakeholders who did not collaborate among them, so aeioTU had to do orchestrate the collaboration
- 13 cities - with their corresponding mayors, and secretaries. In each city, they had about 1-4 communities to work with.  In each community they worked with approximately 5 local actors - so around 100+partners at a time
- 10 national partners - that came with us to several regions of the country to do advocacy, funding, and support operation
- 4 academic organizations
- 50+ private and social organizations.

As of 2023, aeioTU has worked to improve the quality and coverage of early education in Colombia, Mexico, and Panama impacting the life of an estimated 800,000 children, the abilities and knowledge of 58,137 teachers, enriching the quality of 4,791 educational spaces, and the parenting practices of 993,726 parents and caregivers.