- GovTech Latam is an open innovation program that allows new digital solutions to be brought closer to the great challenges of participating municipalities.
- This program is led by IDB Lab, the innovation laboratory of the IDB Group, in collaboration with the IDB Cities Network and the IE PublicTech Lab, a center of the Instituto de Empresa expert in public digital transformation and generation of GovTech ecosystems.
- Cali is the first city in Colombia to implement this program, which lasts one year and begins today, April 29, with the participation of two organizations of the District Administration.
Santiago de Cali, April 29, 2024
The Mayor’s Office of Santiago de Cali presented to the BIDLab, the District’s modernization strategy, which is focused on developing solutions to the city’s problems through technology and artificial intelligence, through open innovation challenges.
This strategy is led by the Technology Hub of the Ministry of Economic Development and is part of the global trend called GovTech.
The program, which lasts one year, will be developed in stages and begins with the identification of a city problem, followed by a call for technology and data companies to present solutions that can then be scaled and generated. high impact. In the case of the Mayor’s Office of Cali, the Ministry of Health and the Administrative Department of Public Legal Management are the entities participating in this program.
“We are very excited to share with the people of Cali that Cali is the first city in Colombia to join this program, which is a milestone for our city and country. “We want to have an efficient administration, which relies on technology to provide effective solutions, in less time, that allow us to improve the quality of life of citizens and, above all, internally promote the modernization of our processes,” said the mayor of Santiago de Cali, Alejandro Eder Garcés.
It should be remembered that Govtech is the ecosystem where governments collaborate with startups, scale-ups, investors, international organizations and MSMEs that use data intelligence, digital technologies and innovative methodologies to provide products and services that solve public challenges. Additionally, it favors interaction with citizens and academic entities so that public institutions have the best tools to respond to complex problems.
The IDB’s GovTech Latam program already has open innovation projects in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador. In Colombia, Cali has been the city selected by the BIDLab to start the program in the country.
For her part, María Eugenia Lloreda Piedrahita, advisor to the firm and leader of the Technology Hub, stated that “we have been contacting the different startups and technology-based companies in the city and it is very gratifying to see how there are world-class businesses created in Cali that offer their services nationally and internationally. This panorama, added to the experience of universities and research centers, gives us peace of mind that our human and business fabric can take on the open innovation challenges that we are going to release within the framework of this IDB program.”
For Mayor Eder, “this program will also carry out a training process in open innovation methodology, so that our technical teams can replicate the model in other organizations in the District.”
It is expected that during the third quarter of this year the pilots of the solutions to the problems identified by the Ministry of Health and the Administrative Department of Public Legal Management of the Mayor’s Office of Cali will be carried out.
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Communications Secretariat of Economic Development
