Our world is still full of all sorts of inequalities. I recently read that 60 % of the wealth of the USA is in the hands of 2 % of its population (I have no way of checking such statements, but if it is remotely true, it would just be incredibly sad). There are multi-national companies which have larger annual budgets than governments of roughly one third of the world's countries. Still way too many people around the world live on that famous one or two dollars per day. But believe it or not, things have become better. Inequality is nothing new. It always existed and probably - to a certain extend - always will exist. But as responsible and caring world citizens we have to try to work towards better distribution of our combined wealth while also learning to become more careful with our limited natural resources. It is for me a humbling experience to work with some of the thousands of SENA staff members who take care of vocational training & education for 6 million Colombians each year. All the training they offer is free and it is financed through a system of industry taxes, a system which is becoming a bit obsolete around the world, but for the current inequalities in Colombia is probably still the best solution under the complex realities of this country.
SENA offers training courses and programs from as short as 40 hours and as long as two years. The organization has a wide range of so-called "social inclusion programs" for vulnerable groups of its population. In the photo above a program is promoted for "youth at risk". Many different types of training projects exist within that program alone: for youth of families who fled the guerilla war of the country-side during the past 50 years and now live in very poor areas around the larger cities, for youth of rural areas who in many cases are still very much at risk of being recruited by guerilla groups or criminal groups, and for youth of population groups who are still very much subject of a variety of discriminatory activities. Some of the SENA training center have programs for youth at the ages of 12-13 years and they call them "talentos" (talents). In addition to their regular school hours of their early years of middle and high school these kids get trained at SENA in high tech trades such as micro-electronics and bio-technology, just to stimulate their curiosity and to give their - in general low - academic self-confidence a huge boost. In one of my posts of January I described some of this (Tecno Parque post).
The communications team of SENA works hard to make the public aware of these programs. On this publicity board there are programs explained for victims of land-mines, for war veterans and for new women entrepreneurs. If you can read Spanish, go to www.sena.edu.co and you can read quite a bit about the wide variety of programs SENA offers around social inclusion programs. I think they ran out of funding recently, but they even had their own micro-credit program for a while.
During the past three months I have learned a lot more about the political complexities of Colombia. Today we had a meeting at the National Ministry of Mines to discuss how we can work together in our EFE program pilot region. As I described, the informal mining of minerals such as gold and the unregulated use of mercury is already causing huge environmental and public health damage. It is just one of the many programs the Ministry is working on together with SENA. Our Canadian funded EFE program will accelerate the introduction of new training programs to reduce the use of mercury in that specific region where the Ministry so far had not been able to do much. It must sometimes feel for them to swim up against the stream, but it is always encouraging to see the passion people put into making situations better and more regulated.
On this specific Friday afternoon, I lean back and think how amazing it is to be able to take part in this work and show a little bit of international solidarity. My contribution is really only very small, and our Canadian funded program is just a drop in the ocean of needs. But this drop already starts to show some excellent "ripple effects"......
Hope you all will have a good weekend!
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