Cuidá bien (Care Well)

Latin America and the Caribbean have 8 million elder people with dependencies and it is estimated that this number will scale to 27 millions in 2050. Some countries have developed public policies to satisfy the care demands of this population, but its reach is far from being universal. Because of this, the tasks fall on the families, and mainly on the women who take care of them with limited resources and knowledge. Only a small percentage of families are in conditions of hiring personnel, in general, also women with limited resources and knowledge that work in informal conditions. The consequences of this context are, besides bringing down the quality of the care given, an overload of physical, emotional and economical stress of the caregivers, whether they are family or hired people. 

Taking into consideration the diagnosis held by Cuidá Bien in 2021, we identified the necessity of building care support webs conformed by families, professionals, hired caregivers and elder people, as well as articulating the  expert knowledge of professionals with the know-hows and practical knowledge of the caregivers. 

It has been verified that the emotional load associated with the tarks is enormous and that the caregivers need to share their experiences. It was also confirmed that the certification of the knowledge of the hired caregivers is a necessity both to give a status to the task as well as to orient the hiring of third-parties. Finally, it was verified that the caregiving tasks are deeply feminized and that it is necessary to regulate the work of hired caregivers and visibilize the existence of the vigent legislation that contemplates them.

The solution is the creation of a digital community of caregivers. We have developed a digital course that is agile, attractive and of quality that is designed specifically to cover the necessity of the familiar caregivers. We have found a deficit in the training of these populations and many times does not count with the time available or the interest of doing caregiver professional training. The materials can be found in www.cuidabien.org.

The solution serves the caregivers of elder people, that may be families of hired caregivers. They are mostly women of low socioeconomic levels without caregiving training. 

The program will certify their knowledge, giving their jobs a status, improving the quality of the care and giving them tools to avoid the physical and emotional stress caused by the job. 

It will also affect the elderly people, who will be given a voice in the matter of their own cares. They will also be direct beneficiaries of the improvement in the quality of the caregiving.

Our team diagnosed the problem and was conformed to provide solutions to it. Our organization, Impacto Digital, is centered in designing technological solutions for social problems. Flavia Diaz, the project coordinator, is a communication professional and has experience in the caregiving of elder family members, and therefore has an insight to the problem. Cuida Bien has a diffusion perspective and aims to reach the biggest quantity of people and therefore Flavia, as a communications professional, is right for the job. The Impacto Digital team shares its mission and perspectives. We believe that if we use new technologies, we can scale and potentiate the impact of initiatives to grant human rights. We also work with a gender perspective, which is fundamental, taking into consideration the feminization of the care tasks.

At Impacto Digital, we are always looking for ways to scale our programmes. We expect that Solve can help overcome the stagnation and that with this aid we will be able to reach every time more caregivers in the world.

Our solution is innovative because it presents a technology solution to a historic problem. We offer trainings for caregivers and a web of companionship for them in order to improve the quality of the care they give. We do so taking also into account gender perspective, in order to reduce stereotypes in caregiving, a deeply feminized area of work.  

Our iImpact goals for the next year are: 

To sustain and grow our virtual community through the positioning in searches, web site, mailing subscriptions and facebook page.

Expand the reach of the contents of the training and generating scalable solutions from them, directed to public organisms and companies.

Train around 50.000 caregivers asynchronically and 1500 synchronically. 

Our goals for the next five years: 

To regionalize the program to Latin America and the Caribbean, taking into consideration the legislation of the countries in the region.

Have an active community of the program. 

Have association with universities and academic institutions to impart our trainings.

To measure our impact, we take into account several types of indicators that allow us to see how many people the program is reaching and to measure the quality and impact of the program. These are: Inscriptions to the trainings, participations in the spaces, permanency of the students and final survey about habit changes, Facebook and Google ads metrics, user expierience surveys.

The program's theory of change starts with the discovery of the problem. We have found a deficit in the training of non-professional elderly caregivers. Then, we made a diagnosis, through focus groups, interviews with specialists, and a review of secondary sources. In the co-creation stage, we designed the solution with an interdisciplinary development team from the public, private, social, and academic sectors. Them came the production, we wrote scripts and an academic review as well as did the filming and post-production. Lastly came the launching,  we launched the virtual course and the Forum on Innovation, Care, and Public Policy.

Our solution is powered by a digital platform, https://cuidabien.org/ . There, caregivers can get access to the online training and spaces of the program. This results in a digital community that gives support to this population. We also use social networks for the creation of the Cuidá Bien community, to favor dialogue and exchange of experiences.

Communication is also a technology that powers our program. The diffusion is central for Cuidá Bien, and we have developed several strategies to reach caregivers in social networks. We have designed campaigns and are constantly renewing our strategies to reach more people.

At impacto digital we fight towards diversity, inclusion and equity. One of our main programs, Contratá Trans (Hire Transgender) wills to solve the laboral discrimination suffered by transgender people and presents a solution towards laboral inclusion of this population. We also have programs that celebrate cultural diversity, such as Dale más afro (Turn Up the Afro), that celebrates african and afro-descendant culture. Our project staff and coordinators are composed mainly by women, transgender people and people from heterogeneous countries in Latin America.

We are an organization that designs digital solutions to social problems. Therefore, we provide our beneficiaries with access to free services. This services go from a platform to upload CVs for transgender people to trainings on laboral inclusion, caregiving and more. This is free access, because we believe in the development of technology for the common good. 

Our finances are based on donations and grants and providing services.  During 2021 we promoted 4 programs, 6 virtual courses, 11 human rights campaigns and 3 strengthening projects for social organizations. We did all of this in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, the United States, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala and Argentina, because we believe in the development of technology for the common good. 

We expect that the scale up of the program will give it more visibility and that we may engage new donors to grow. All our financial information and transparency reports are available at our website: https://impactodigital.org/en/...

Impacto Digital works with the donations of several organisms. In 2021, we received USD 153.159,34 from international agencies and embassies USD 5.085,56 from individual donors, USD 88.467,55 from Foundations and companies USD 3.095,43 from State institutions. This has made it possible to run all of our programmes and projects. All of this information is available in

https://impactodigital.org/en/...