Catalina Alzate MoraUniversity of Los AndesBogotá, Colombia

GO FORWARD! Saving togetherSaving education strategy for the street vendor community in Bogotá

more on: www.vimeo.com/catalinaalzate/palante

Key words: Enterprises, education, community-based enterprises.

Street vendors are poor people who sell products of immediate consumption in the streets. They cannot save money because it is not enough, they don’t have appropriate mechanisms to save and they have no access to formal financial services. Vendors are in contact with many sectors of society who are able to develop business models with them, but there are no mechanisms to convene efforts from all sectors.

‘Go forward!’ is a saving education strategy for the street vendors. It enables them to strength their capacities to overcome poverty and pursue a life project. ‘Go Forward!’ convenes and balances private sector, local government and civil society around small groups of street vendors. Those groups are guided in a process of collective savings, gathered from the sale of private subsidized products. Such products have a label recognized by the civil society. Local government encourages and supervises cooperation among actors.

Design role: Development of the project with human centered methodologies, that allowed the comprehension of users and set the proper incentives. The process included creative methodologies, assisted by an economist. It kept the focus on the human being as a principle and measure of success, putting other considerations such as financial, political or market areas, depending on the human development of vendors.