SENA Cartagena

Today I will take you on a short "virtual tour" of a business & technical vocational training center in the city of Cartagena in the north of Colombia. Cartagena is the capital of a province called "Bolivar" which stretches from the Atlanctic ocean deep into the country side. SENA has in each province one or more of their training centers. One of the three centers in Bolivar is located just outside of the city of Cartagena near a large industrial area and not too far from some important agriculture areas. The center offers a wide variety of training programs (as you will see at the photos), but its main focus is on agriculture (& husbandry) and mining. These are the two main economic sectors of the Bolivar province and therefore many vocational training needs exist. Here is the center's sign:

Bibiana and Jaime are two of the senior managers of the center (behind them on the wall you can see the map of the Bolivar province with in different colors its municipalities). Jaime is the Director for the entire SENA operations in the Bolivar province, and Bibiana runs this specific center. Bibiana is my main project partner in our EFE program and the past 3 weeks and coming 3 weeks we spent a lot of time together "on the road" visiting our EFE program "pilot sites" (more posts about that later).

Bibiana gave Sandra (my main colleague in the SENA Bogota office) and me a tour of the campus:

One of their business programs: the open concept again - both larger group and small group work going on in the same space. They are college students but they are also wearing uniforms here...

One of their chemical laboratories. They were doing applied research on animal products that day.

A group of students in their computer repair/engineering program. And then baking and culinary:

Their training restaurant (and in the background the "laboratory" for bartending). In the corridors the Colombian Red Cross was doing the day we visited a voluntary blood donation clinic (and they also used that opportunity for an AIDS awareness and STD information campaign):

This training center has a modest horticulture program and a small experimental agriculture farm:

Throughout the campus they have a reclying program and the empty plastic bottles are used for the planting of experimental seeds in the farm area. Bibiana would love to also offer practical programs in husbandry, but at this campus there is no space (nor permission) to keep animals. They hope to get a dedicated campus for that somewhere further in-land in a more rural area.

The province stretches a long way geographically with many areas where there are only dirt roads. In order to reach out with training programs they have "mobile laboratories" such as the one above.

One of the important focus groups for SENA training are "youth at risk". Below is a photo of a session on "life and work skills" for such a group of young adults living in low income areas of the city. Doing these programs in an urban setting is challenging enough. Doing them in remote rural areas is even more difficult and this is one of our main challenges in the EFE program.

For the rural areas, land use has long been an area of little attention. SENA tries to bring change with programs making use of today's GIS technology. Below a few photos of the equipment used to plot acurate land cards. The SENA team goes out with student teams to do measurements (see the field measurement kit), then digitalizes the results on the computer and plots the maps on their own printer

Here is the GIS teacher team with Bibiana. The male teacher explained in excellent English that his girl-friend is from Canada.... small world of course. For their work they also use some solar powered equipment as well as water & soil testing equipment:

After all the touring we went back to our work on the EFE program planning. A very interesting day in Cartagena with the SENA Bolivar team. This was after we visited a very remote rural area of the province where we will pilot our EFE program with new training programs for small scale miners and small scale farmers. In the next few posts more about that... !