Laboratory of technological initiatives for schoolgovernance

Democracy in Colombia is representative and has a broad spectrum of mechanisms and spaces for participation with a differential approach, including youth participation. However, the levels of public incidence of this population are low.

In Colombia, according to the Latinobarómetro, only 3 out of 10 youths believe that those in power are interested in their opinions. A lecture of citizen participation implies recognizing the existence of asymmetric notions and trajectories. A recent study conducted by the project "Nuestra Barranquilla" (2022) determined that more than 50% of youth in Barranquilla are alien to formal participation mechanisms and are unaware of concepts and tools such as Development Plans (local, departmental, national). The best known mechanism is the recently elected Youth Councils, in which less than 10% of this population participated.

In the educational environment, there are also mechanisms that encourage civic participation from school age. According to Quiñones y Tavera (2021)  School Government "is a real space that fosters training in participation, democracy, the responsibility to elect and be elected; to represent the interests of the educational community and develop the capacity for political leadership in the institution".

Despite having spaces to channel youth demands, the incidence of this population in Barranquilla does not increase. Their capacities, rights, and potential as fundamental agents within the processes of governance, co-formulation, and co-creation of programs and policies that benefit them are underestimated, and the situation is worse in the case of students in public educational institutions at the secondary level. Precisely because these latter spaces have greater restrictions, they reinforce young people's low levels of trust in formal institutions.

Likewise, access to information and communication technologies in the educational environment is much more restricted; so far, the efforts of local administrations have focused on providing resources, such as tablets, to students, leaving aside the infrastructure that allows connectivity, including the capabilities and uses that information and communication technologies can have for the processing of problems (as evidenced in the news item MinTIC and District Strengthen Technology in Public Schools in Barranquilla). Not to mention the failure represented by the Vive Digital connectivity points, which today are closed since their maintenance was not assumed by any local and/or national agency (DNP, 2018).

This context constitutes an environment with few guarantees for the development of a civic culture that allows youth participation and advocacy in public affairs with the use of information and communication technologies.

The execution of this laboratory contributes to the qualification of competencies and technical and practical skills on civic participation and the use of IT tools by creating spaces where students and teachers analyze their environment and identify innovative solutions promoting citizen advocacy and youth leadership, contributing to the deliberation in the school government and the local area of the city.

This process has four phases:

1. Mapping of actors and needs

In this phase, not only the educational institutions where the process will be developed are chosen following established criteria, but also the baseline of the project is built to identify the needs of the agents of change and their environment at a socio-emotional and advocacy level.

1. Co-creation for the empowerment of technical and human capacities

This phase includes training sessions about democracy, IT tools, especially in software development and big data, and socio-emotional skills. In addition, the collection of this information and the inputs and results of its implementation will be stored as part of the digital ecosystem, which will facilitate the transfer of knowledge with other agents of change.

1. Experimental incubator of initiatives

This is the process of accompaniment and coaching that seeks to ensure that agents of change have the ability to analyze their environment and apply the knowledge acquired to solve problems related to civic participation and demand for rights in their educational environments. To determine how this will be done, the agents of change will have spaces for discussion where they will participate in the methodological construction of the procedure that will be the basis for strengthening their initiatives.

The impact of these initiatives is aimed at the educational community as it seeks to optimize accountability processes, conflict and/or needs management, school government transparency, etc., through the use of IT tools, specifically through the design of a web page that, through data analysis, facilitates the processing of problems and solutions for civic participation and the strengthening of democracy in the school environment.

Thus, this page constitutes the creation of a digital ecosystem where not only the methodologies and pedagogical inputs of LITIC are stored but also the different initiatives that contribute to the solution of the problems and issues identified concerning the experience of school governments.

This platform projects that, in the long term, they will be able to make this page an observatory of governance in secondary education that will be an input for decision-makers in the educational environment.

LITIC has a direct impact on 100 people. Eighty of them (80) are high school students in their last two years of study, and another twenty (20) teachers that accompany the process in the eight educational institutions where it is developed. It will also benefit more than 2,000 people, including direct family members, members of educational institutions, and the general public receiving digital products.

The Foro Costa Atlántica Foundation has been recognized for its work in citizen training processes, in which the implementation of the Democratic Leadership Schools stands out. These pedagogical devices are based on participatory methodologies, privileging "learning by doing" and the collective construction of knowledge, linked to sustaining the theory in political, social, and community practice. All this is to qualify social actors as agents of change that generate local processes of democratization. Multiple actors have participated in these processes, including defenders of the rights of children and adolescents, social and community leaders, women, victims, university students, city councilors, public officials, political parties, environmentalists, peasants, observers, journalists, and social communicators, among others. In the last 8 years, the execution of the schools has privileged the work around the training of young people, adolescents, and social leaders, allowing us to work with more than 1,100 young people in different departments of the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

It is also worth mentioning that young people have been key to the development of these processes since the organization has been increasing the labor linkage of this population for the implementation of each of the projects developed by the institution. Working and developing innovative methodologies according to the needs of the environment and agents of change involved in each of these projects and programs.

Additionally, this project is born from an analysis of the local and national context of youth and democracy. In 2019, FCA conducted research on the motivations and thoughts of young marchers in the protests of that year; additionally, in 2020 and 2021, with the result of the implementation of one of the Youth Leadership Schools, aspects to be strengthened in young people of secondary school age were evidenced; and finally, in 2022 and 2023, our work with youth organizations in the district of Barranquilla brought us even closer to the youth demands and their need to be oriented in the routes of civic participation and public advocacy. Thus, LITIC is a project that has the basis and inputs for FCA and its team to implement.

In its 32 years of existence, FCA has managed to develop and improve training and strengthening processes through organizational accompaniment, managing funding from international agents such as USAID, Bread for the World, Ford Foundation, and the Norwegian Fund for Human Rights, among others.

The training and civic advocacy processes are part of the DNA of Foro Costa, LITIC is a product with which we innovate with the evaluation of each of the implementations of this model over the years. In this case, we want to inject a more technological approach to something that is part of the organizational know-how. LITIC is the implementation of a fresher and more innovative vision of a process that we have been improving and developing more and more.

One of the strategies that FCA uses to manage resources is to apply for Grants that offer international cooperation, networking is another key strategy for mobilizing resources for the implementation of programs, projects, and development processes. However, the latter has been a challenge for the organization, as it has not been able to consolidate actions that allow us to reach new actors in the international system. Solve MIT provides the opportunity to strengthen the proposal and also creates bridges of dialogue with potential funders in the United States. For this reason, Solve represents a support tool for the mobilization of resources that will allow the implementation of LITIC in Barranquilla, Colombia.

In Barranquilla, there are already youth empowerment processes aimed at increasing civic participation and public advocacy. However, none of them accompanies young students in their educational environment, promoting solutions through the use of IT tools. This laboratory begins its piloting with eight schools; however, the impact will be to create a platform where decision-makers in educational institutions can find sources of information and data analysis that represent the voices of young students.

This being so, LITIC is one of the first initiatives in which civic values are developed and approaches the handling of problems through participation in the school government using innovative solutions with the use of technologies, having high school students as actors of constant change in their direct environment. That is to say, we seek that, through a process of transformation and creation, young people visualize themselves from a very young age as actors in their cities, beyond the electoral process. Understanding that the enforceability of rights is a constant process that starts even with the school government This is why LITIC works shoulder to shoulder with public educational institutions, trying to foster skills from a very young age and close inequality gaps.

Likewise, the initiatives seek to build new forms of advocacy that make use of creativity, technology, and the culture of young people in their own environments. They seek to build civic capacities that are easy to appropriate and can last over time.

During the following year, through the implementation of LITIC and its previously mentioned activities, it is projected that young high school students and their accompanying teachers in the district of Barranquilla will be able to influence the enforceability of rights and decision-making through the use of IT tools. It is also projected to implement at least eight advocacy initiatives that use IT tools to benefit the educational community and its school government. In addition, the development of LITIC seeks to ensure that young people and teachers contribute to the construction of healthy educational environments with quality education and multiply and transfer skills to other students and teachers.

Likewise, in five years, LITIC is projected as an observatory where, through the platform, more educational institutions will become involved, turning it into a platform whose information analysis is reliable and easily accessible for students, teachers, decision-makers, and opinion makers. In this way, we seek to contribute to increasing the levels of youth advocacy in the educational sphere of the city, contributing to the creation of an ecosystem that empowers information and knowledge, promotes spaces for young people to get involved, and motivates them to participate in the enforcement of their rights using the tools and spaces that democracy and its mechanisms of participation make available to them. In addition, FCA, in the development of its mission and vision, permanently creates bridges of multi-stakeholder dialogue with qualified agents of change that allow the processing of citizen discrepancies in different environments and city issues.

Each of the processes that FCA designs has monitoring and governance committees that include the team executing the solution and representatives of the agents of change, which not only facilitates monitoring but also legitimizes decision-making in the implementation of the project.

In this case, the indicators for evaluating the progress of the LITIC process, starting from the baseline at the beginning of implementation, are broken down as follows:

• Increased percentage of youth input into institutional designs for school governance

• Increase in the number of formal, deliberative, and decision-making spaces in which young people and teachers participate

• At least 80 young people participate in the experimental initiative incubator

• Increase in percentage of technical and conceptual knowledge acquired

• At least 3 training sessions on civic participation, ICT tools and socioemotional skills are developed.

• At least eight digital advocacy initiatives are developed and made visible.

LITIC's intervention logic is based on the premise that empowered actors have an effective impact. This is why the training, co-creation, accompaniment, and coaching activities aim at three results: (1) the empowerment of technical and human skills and competencies of the agents of change (students and accompanying teachers); (2) the development of the experimental incubator of digital initiatives and their development; and (3) the construction of a digital ecosystem that not only collects the memories and tools for knowledge transfer but also makes the initiative visible and enhances its impact.

These results will allow (1) young people and teachers to identify problems and provide innovative solutions through the use of IT tools; (2) the implementation of community and digital advocacy initiatives in the educational and citizen environment that promote reflection on participation and civic values in young people and the school government; and (3) young people and teachers to transfer and multiply knowledge and skills with other students and teachers.

Thus, LITIC ends up contributing to the increased involvement of secondary school-age youth in the demand for fundamental rights related to access to quality education.

All of this can be verified, not only through the LITIC baseline but also based on statistical data on youth civic participation at the district level and diagnoses carried out by peer organizations in the city.

Taking into account the levels of infrastructure and the poor access to technology and connectivity that exist in the educational environment of Barranquilla, the heart of LITIC is the design of a web platform that can be accessed with fewer infrastructure conditions, which is the backbone of the construction of eight thematic initiatives that allow the collection and analysis of data for the enforcement of specific rights and contribute to the deliberation on the management of quality education.

Thus, this platform will be a living and dynamic tool where students and teachers will find a place to address needs and obstacles to accessing quality education. These data are analyzed and show statistics in real-time, and there will also be space to visualize actions that are proposed as a solution according to each of the issues raised.

For this reason, the co-creation processes with young people will include spaces for socialization and the exchange of experiences on how technology can influence the solutions we provide to social problems. Thus, they will be able to make use of it in the development and construction of their initiatives. In general, the use of social networks, audiovisual media, the construction of applications, and artificial intelligence will be promoted to facilitate the contribution to the solution of the problems that the initiatives seek to mitigate. In this way, we seek to promote the use of technological tools as a means to achieve a more participatory and inclusive society.

The Foro Costa Atlantica Foundation is committed to creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive work environment. So much so that the foundation's team is composed mostly of women and young people. Currently, the three coordinators of the foundation are women, and 62% are young professionals who accompany the initiatives we develop. Likewise, we are constantly opening learning and training spaces to achieve greater inclusion. We recently received training on inclusion for people with disabilities, macho narratives, and new masculinities in the workplace. We even remodeled the organization's headquarters to ensure accessibility for people with disabilities.

Likewise, the organization seeks to build safe and inclusive spaces for the communities we work with. For this, we implement inclusive language when addressing the people we work with and in the forms and/or forms to be filled out; we promote non-discrimination and respect in all the activities we carry out; and communicatively, we seek to ensure that the pieces we share are inclusive for LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities.

Finally, in our projects and processes, we promote the participation of women in a differentiated manner in decision-making and institutional governance spaces.

In terms of impact, beyond the FCA's mission and vision, the organization has managed to strengthen life skills in the agents of change with whom it has worked through its experience, allowing technical knowledge to contribute to the human construction of the processes and their results, to ensure that leadership is integral and healthy, that it is born from self-care and knowledge of my environment, and that it allows for the adaptability of the processes and their people.

Following this idea, FCA has been involved in each of its projects over the last three years in processes of financial autonomy for the mobilization and management of financial and non-financial resources for the development of individuals and/or organizations that work for community development, thus enhancing social impact while managing their financial sustainability.

In addition to mobilizing resources through relationships and grant applications in international cooperation calls, FCA has a portfolio of services offered to civil society and its stakeholders. These include advisory processes for the improvement of governance in public and private institutions and research products.

The latter has also enabled FCA to be contracted as a project executor outside the organization and to work on a deliverable basis.

This model has allowed the organization to be sustainable for more than 30 years. However, with innovative strategies, we plan to expand this portfolio in the coming year.

The organization, through the Project Management Office, has managed more than US$150,000 in the last three years for the development of different projects.

Additionally, as part of the organization Foro Nacional por Colombia, we have implemented projects with funding from international actors such as USAID, Ford Foundation, Publish What You Pay, Bread for the World, Norwegian Fund for Human Rights, among others. At the national level, we have been funded by actors such as the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE), Viva la Ciudadana, among others.

Therefore, for FCA, relationships and good resource management are key to continuing to be sustainable and to continuing to impact our local, departmental, and national environments.