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Team’s Contact:
Isabelle Brooking: www.linkedin.com/in/isabella-brooking
Sheryl Lee: www.linkedin.com/in/sheryl-lll/
Moduro Adeoye: www.linkedin.com/in/mdadeoye
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Bello’s peripheral communities face a severe digital exclusion crisis driven by informal land tenure, limited infrastructure, and reliance on unstable mobile‑only connectivity. This prevents children, youth, and adults from accessing the digital tools, educational resources, and online services required for social mobility and economic participation. Without reliable, community‑appropriate digital infrastructure, displaced and low‑income families remain trapped in inter generational disadvantage, unable to benefit from the opportunities available in the wider Aburrá Valley. This has significantly hindered Bello’s growth and has impacted a multitude of social issues. Ensuring digital equity is therefore essential for building resilience, tackling social constraints, improving educational outcomes, and enabling meaningful inclusion in the modern economy.
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Our solution is to turn today’s excluded, underused land into community‑led digital learning zones that attract both NGOs and private investment. In each zone, communities and regional authorities first secure and stabilize land, addressing tenure, safety, and landslide risks so it becomes viable for long‑term use. NGOs then provide catalytic support - funding, expertise, and volunteers - to build core infrastructure (such as improvements in drainage systems) and digital‑ready education spaces. Once the foundations are in place, private firms invest in facilities and connectivity, often through their philanthropic and impact arms, gaining low‑cost land and a future local talent pool. A share of the value created flows back to communities through jobs, training, and revenue‑sharing, while students gain sustained access to digital education and online opportunities. Over time, this model closes the digital education gap and makes these regions credible destinations for further investment and dignified work.
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Our solution relies on several assumptions, which we address directly in early implementation. we assume communities will participate in land identification so we begin with priority setting workshops, women and youth training, construction jobs and documented community consent before investment. We assume land tenure and safety risks can be clarified and managed, so phase 1 focuses on geotechnical checks and small stabilization plans that could protect 3,000 - 5,000 residents. We assume NGOs and firms will see value in discounted land and future talent, which we test by co designing the first zones with an anchor NGO and 1-2 early corporate partners. finally, recognizing regulatory and security variation across regions, we start with careful site selection and contingency planning rather than uniform roll out
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In Bello, learners and their communities are being locked out of the digital age. They face a severe digital exclusion crisis: land is informally held, physically unsafe, and lacks basic infrastructure, so digital exclusion reduces access to formal employment, remote work, training and community learning spaces. As a result, students and young people depend on unstable mobile‑only connections and cannot reliably access digital tools, quality educational resources, or the online services that now underpin social mobility and economic participation. It has indirectly affected many social issues that Bello faces today. This widens the gap between these communities and the rest of the world’s increasingly digitalised education systems and labour markets. Those most affected are learners and teachers, but local governments, NGOs, and potential investors are all constrained by the same fragile infrastructure base (landslide-prone and informally settled areas).
Underneath the digital gap lies a land and governance problem. Much of the land in these territories is underutilised or unusable because tenure is informal, state presence is weak, and communities live with risks from violence and natural hazards such as landslides. Decades of limited public investment mean roads, electricity, and safe buildings are missing or highly degraded, making it costly and risky to deploy fibre, towers, or learning centres. High informality in work and education levels further depresses incomes, so even where basic mobile connectivity exists, many households cannot afford devices, data, or the skills to benefit from them. Together, these factors keep land underused, deter outside investment, and turn what should be productive, connected territories into “digital dead zones.”
The ideal future is one where these same territories become safe, productive, and digitally connected learning ecosystems. Legally secure and physically stabilised land plus connectivity can expand local productivity, raise employability, and enable teacher resources and skills training. Basic infrastructure - roads, power, and resilient buildings - supports reliable, affordable connectivity and could also see safer daily routines for children and women if slope stabilisation, public lighting, internet access, mobility and local employability arrive together, hence, also tackling some social issues Bello faces today. Learners of all ages can participate in high‑quality digital education, access global knowledge, and qualify for better, future‑proof jobs. NGOs, private firms, and regional governments collaborate around a common goal: using land more intelligently to close the digital education gap, raise incomes, and make these regions credible destinations for sustainable investment.
Our solution is to create community‑led digital learning zones on currently underused land, backed by a coalition of communities, regional governments, NGOs, and foreign investors. In each zone, communities and local authorities first secure and stabilise land - clarifying tenure, addressing safety and landslide risks, and prioritising sites with strong potential for agriculture, logistics, or light industry. NGOs then provide catalytic support: funding, specialised expertise, and volunteers to build core infrastructure and digital‑ready education spaces, while also strengthening local capacity. Once this foundation is in place, private firms - especially those with philanthropic or impact arms - invest in facilities and connectivity (for example, agro‑processing plants, logistics hubs, or tech‑enabled textile production), attracted by discounted land and a future skilled workforce. Sectors with natural synergies include agriculture and agro‑processing (using local land and skills), coal‑linked or other raw‑material value chains where appropriate, and water‑intensive industries like textiles in regions with strong water‑management potential, provided strict environmental standards are enforced.
As the zones mature, they evolve into digital learning ecosystems that directly bridge the education gap between local Bello residents and the rest of the world. After land is stabilised and basic services are in place, NGOs and local authorities co‑develop permanent digital education facilities equipped with reliable connectivity, devices, and curated curricula aligned to the needs of incoming firms (for example, agro‑tech, logistics, coding, or textile design). These centres host blended programmes: foundational literacy and numeracy, digital skills bootcamps, remote classes with global universities, and apprenticeship-style training co-designed with employers, so learners can seamlessly transition from classroom to paid work within the same zone. Over time, each zone becomes a self-reinforcing hub where communities gain globally relevant skills, firms gain a pipeline of locally rooted digital talent, and successive cohorts of learners plug into global markets without leaving Bello, structurally narrowing the digital education divide.
Medellin, another city in the Antioquia department in northwest Colombia, has seen improvement from this proposed solution, making the place safer and more connected physically, then digital and private sector gains scale faster.
To manage key uncertainties, our first implementation phase focuses on a few carefully chosen pilot zones with strong community partners, clear land claims, and early NGO and corporate anchors. We use participatory consent processes, legal and geotechnical due diligence, and flexible financing structures to test and refine the model before scaling.
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Brand, P. and Dávila, J. (2011) Mobility innovation at the urban margins.
UN‑Habitat (2013) MedellĂn Urban Transformation Case Study.
World Bank (2020) Colombia Urban Development Report.
OECD (2022) Economic Surveys: Colombia.
Inter‑American Development Bank (2019) Digital Infrastructure in Latin America.
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