This program seeks to promote the comprehensive, diverse and inclusive development of girls and boys from 0 to 6 years old involving a perspective of vital cycles, to protect their rights to education, healthcare, nutrition and care, through inter-sectorial and inter-institutional tasks aimed to consolidate, establish and implement a public policy for the city’s children.
The Good Start program rises from the commitment that the Mayor’s Office of Medellin has with the boys and girls of the poorest 3 social-economic levels of the city, to whom there is a high social debt and can change their living conditions provided they are offered opportunities. According to National Bureau of Statistics (DANE) 2007 report, there are 207,610 boys and girls under 6 years old living in Medellin, of which 73,8% live in vulnerable conditions. This means that the city has approximately 99,369 boys and girls that lack basic conditions to fully develop their skills and potentials as human beings during their early ages.
Although during the first years the State, through the ICBF (Colombian Institute of Family Welfare) has focused its attention to protect boys and girls, and five years later the pre-school public education was assumed by the education sector, the city’s administration, through the Good Start Program currently recognizes that an early integrated service has positive impacts on the scholar, personal and future performance of the population.
The entire management of the Good Start Program involves the following principles:
■ Initial Education: As a conceptual and operational pillar to guarantee the integrated service of children
■ Early Institutionalization: Of the vulnerable population, as a mechanism to protect and guarantee their rights
■ Progress: To improve the quality of the integrated services provided to children (healthcare, education, nutrition and protection)
■ Concurrence: In terms of financing, with the national entities responsible of the public policy in charge of children
■Co-responsibility: Of the family, the community and the State, for the integrated development of boys and girls.
3. Solidary Medellin
The purpose of the Solidary Medellin Program is to relief about 60,000 families from extreme poverty through out the city. The intention is for the community to access in an integrated and sustainable manner the programs and projects of the City and of the Nation, so that these families can reach minimum integrated human development.
Through this Program, families can access initiatives which help to improve the income of homes, and to receive training and education to improve cohabitation within family and social settings. Moreover, families learn their rights and participate in diverse cohabitation activities.
On the other hand, the Program also involves co-responsibility of beneficiary homes, which become responsible of their development.
This Program is a strategy led by the First Lady’s Office, with the participation of the Secretariats of Social Welfare, Women, Health, Education, Social Development and INDER (Sports and Recreation Institute) along with national entities such as ICIBF (Colombian Institute of Family Welfare) and the Presidential Program “Red Juntos” (Network Together).
4. Security and Cohabitation
The Major’s Office implements Citizenship Security strategies and policies, which seek to break the cycles of violence and to consolidate preventive tasks. The city’s programs, focused on Security and Cohabitation, conducted by all of the secretariats and headed by the secretariat of Government, generally seek to have dignified neighborhoods and houses plus settings for citizens to meet as well as security and cohabitation furnishings to guarantee the authorities, managing respect for human rights and integrated security.
This too seeks to reestablish the rights of the victims of the armed conflict, to re-socialize those currently in jail, after leaving jails and post-sentenced, to prevent the youth from building ties with outlaws, and to support the social and economic reintegration of those demobilized from illegal armed groups that have signed agreements with the National Government.
The city’s administration has four priority programs which are susceptible to cooperation:
The Citizen’s Security and Cohabitation Political Program:
This program supports the modernizing, training, institutional enhancement as well as technological infrastructure and logistics of the security and justice bodies based in Medellin. The purpose is to achieve increased efficiencies and opportunities to prevent and/or correct criminal activities and to promote cohabitation. This includes the Disarming Plan.
The Peace and Reconciliation Program:
The purpose of this program is to create alternatives to build an inclusive and democratic society through a peace and social reconciliation process, to decrease murder rates and number of victims, by intervening the demobilized population, their families and communities.
The Medellin, Young Force Program:
This program seeks to tie the youth of illegal armed groups by training and integrating them socially and economically to legal settings.
Service to Victims of the Armed Conflict Program:
Hand-in-hand with the National and Departmental Government, this program implements the services set forth in Law 957 of 2005, to aid the victims in their rights and to contribute to their reconciliation. Components: Psychological-social services, Legal guidance, Repair, Reconstruction of the historical remembrance, Communications, Teaching.
Indeed, this program intends to remember what the city experienced in terms of violence by building the House of Remembrance as a mechanism to avoid repeating what happened in the city.
5. Mobility
The purpose is to consolidate the multi-modal transportation system of the Aburra Valley keeping the river as the core axis of the city, implementing this system as a tool for local, regional and national connection. To create a network of the city’s social ties and flows by: creating links with main roads – urban centers – furnishings, and by modernizing the road and railroad system of the nation, complemented by the existing Metro infrastructure and the development of new transportation alternatives related to the environmental recovery of the river and its streams as green public corridors.
The intent of this project is to decrease the accidents rate displayed by the city of Medellin.
Moreover, it seeks to enhance education and methods transferred to the citizens which use the streets, either as pedestrians or users of another means of transportation, so that this is directly reflected on the decrease of the city’s fatal accidents rate.
6. Environment
Through strategic environmental interventions, this seeks the ecological protection of rural soils and the green re-composition of the urban public space through 8 main hills, natural water currents, parks, squares and green areas.
We want to project a city in harmony with nature that provides opportunities for recreation, healthy leisure and cohabitation, respecting cultural identity and the environment.
Green Metropolis (“Metropolí Verde”)
The city has 16,673 hectares destined to consolidate the boundaries to protect and control urban expansion, to recover 8 main hills as public parks, to tie linear parks of streams to the river’s corridor, and the Arvi Regional Park, which represent a new supply of environmental services; Medellin is investing US$163 million in this project.
Cleaner Production
The purpose is to create a technological reconversion of the fuel of 3,000 public transportation vehicles as well as a fund to finance the industry’s modernizing and use of clean technologies. This requires a large investment which allows providing sustainability to the city’s processes to improve the quality of its air.
Recycling Industrial Park
The goal is to have a space that enhances the organization, formalization and production of the Productive Recycling Units of Moravia as well as to set-up and dignify of the work of solid waste recoverors, and overall, create a public space that allows the productivity and consolidation of the city’s recycling culture.
This proposal was born in 2005 by an intervention made by the Secretariat of Environment through two programs that will be conducted in the area of Moravi: “Integrated Management of Solid Waste: A Clean City” and “Environmental Education: The City’s Environmental Management”. Said program led to the study “Design of Intervention Strategies to Handle Solid Waste in the Road Corridor of Avenue 52 and Regional Avenue in Moravia, Municipality of Medellin”, which in turn led to the creation of the Moravia and its Surrounding Area Recycling Industrial Park, assumed by the Secretariat of Social Development which in turn hired the study “Implementing Strategies for the Proper Management of Solid Waste in Moravia and the Surrounding Areas of the Recycling Industrial Park”.
Arvi Park
This is an eco-tourist proposal located in the villages of Piedras Blancas, Piedra Gorda and Mazo, in the town of Santa Elena, which is in the rural area of the municipality of Medellin.
This is an public park set on 1,761 hectares of public land which, through the construction of an organized touristic package, gives way to consolidate a strategy to conserve and promote the potentials and strengths of the town of Santa Elena, highlighting eco-tourism, archeological patrimony, the “silleta” tradition as well as a variety of flora and fauna which is part of this fog forest. (Source: www.parquearvi.org)
7. Culture
“Education and Culture are tools used to transform a city and to rebuild a society. This is one of the key elements that have taken place in Medellin in past years”.
Jorge Melguizo, Secretary of Citizenship Culture of Medellin from 2005 to 2009.
Current Secretary of Social Development.
Projects:
Cultural Exchange: With the purpose of achieving the city’s internationalizing culture, cultural exchanges are sought with the presence of cultural groups and organizations of other countries in the spaces of our city and vice versa.
Sexual Diversity: The city seeks to conduct communication and education-based actions focused on overcoming discrimination attitudes and on enhancing the institutional capA.C.I.ty for the prevention and service provided to the violation of the rights of this population. This is why we seek to implement a unified information system for the cases of abuse of the LGTB (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) population, to design a public policy for this population and to create a communication system to recognize sexual diversity.
Medellin - A City to Read
Library Parks: Through this program, we seek to promote and boost reading by using the city’s network of libraries as tools to build social capital.
Historical Remembrance and Patrimony: Through this program, the Major’s Office intends to value, protect and recover the city’s tangible and intangible patrimony by researching the cultural remembrance containing the citizens’ cultural practices, intervening patrimonial goods, making an inventory of the tangible and intangible patrimony, and setting-up educational and participative strategies so that the community can create a sense of belonging and value this patrimony.
Tangible and Intangible Patrimony: This entails recovering the Pre-hispanic trails, enhancing the city’s network of museums, create groups that safeguard and protect these goods, which in turn manages to disclose this patrimony.
Historical Archives: We seek to modernize and enhance the city’s historical archives. Said archives include the documentary memoirs of the Municipality of Medellin. Likewise, the purpose is to disclose these archives through out the city.
Ethnic Diversity: The purpose is to enhance and disclose the organizational and cultural processes of ethnic groups, indigenous groups and afro-descendants present in the city.
Hence, the Secretariat of Citizenship Culture leads the construction or adaptation of the Africal-Descendant Cultural Center, built to carry out activities which enhance and disclose this culture in the city, and through which an action plan to disclose the afro-descendant culture is set forth.
The above involves visiting the ethnic groups set in the city, conduct a proper diagnostic of the community, and create a public communications product to disclose ethnic diversity.
8. Economic Development
Seeks to promote the creation of top-quality and well-paid jobs by establishing an entrepreneurial and corporate development culture and helping to find jobs by training persons in different skills. It involves developing social entrepreneurship based on solidarity and enhancing the creation of associations.
This is possible by creating comprehensive actions that have an effect on every entrepreneurial process, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, involving the fields of: Education, Training for jobs, Support to open businesses, Enhancement of the existing corporate network, Corporate formalizing, Financing and Innovation processes.
Several of the projects included:
1. The Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Which will give shape to the city’s corporate development and is defined as a space to train and consolidate science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship in the City by teaching new business persons and all of the processes involved.
2. Cluster Enhancement: Which consists of explicitly building cooperation and cooperation networks between businesses of sector apparently different, to promote the region’s economic growth in the industries it is naturally competitive in, highlighting the participation of every player relevant to the cluster, which go beyond the main productive chains (businesses, services providers, academics, public institutions, among others).
3. Creation of the Fund to Enhance Science, Technology and Innovation: The goal is to build, capitalize and operate a fund of the city focused on supplying co-financing resources to develop local initiatives of research, science and technology, and institutional development of the Regional Innovation System.