The Industrial University of Santander (UIS), through the Institute of Regional Projection and Distance Education (IPRED), continues to consolidate its commitment to bring higher education to the most remote areas of the department. In a key meeting held this morning, representatives of IPRED-UIS met with delegates from the Mayor’s Office of Lebrija, community leaders from the village of Portugal and other territorial actors, with the purpose of building alliances that guarantee real training opportunities for young people in the region.
“This morning’s meeting is part of the university’s articulation strategy with the territory. In this sense, we are generating support to the schools of the department, which allows the schools themselves to generate development nucleus processes for the territories; this is our strategy of articulation with secondary education establishments”, stated Iván Darío Porras Gómez, Program Coordinator of the Agroindustrial Area of IPRED.
. The main axis of the meeting was to generate an institutional approach that allows designing strategies to expand the educational coverage in rural areas. In particular, the goal is to benefit the students of Colegio Portugal, who face serious difficulties in accessing higher education due to economic and travel limitations.
“There is quite a big difficulty in the territories far from the urban center. Many students are left without professional training and end up in the informal sector. These alliances with the UIS, a nationally recognized university, will allow us to reach this population that does not have the same conditions of access to a professional career,” said Adrián Rangel, general secretary of the Mayor’s Office of Lebrija.
The proposal seeks to establish an inter-institutional agreement to implement relevant academic programs that are contextualized with the needs of the local productive sector. In this way, it is expected to curb youth migration to the cities and, at the same time, strengthen regional productivity through the training of skilled human talent.
Samuel Prada Cobos, former mayor and current external advisor to the Mayor’s Office of Lebrija, said: “We are the department with the most rural development in the country, but our rural communities need access to knowledge to improve productive processes. That is why we are knocking on the doors of the best university in northeastern Colombia, the UIS, to adopt one of our educational institutions in the municipality.
For his part, Leonardo Prada Martínez, rector of Colegio Portugal, said that this partnership represents a long-awaited institutional desire. “In our area, many students do not have the resources to access technical and professional processes. We want to train them to improve local production and that they are the ones who innovate and generate new business ideas in the village of Portugal”.
Through this type of actions, the UIS and IPRED reaffirm their commitment to the decentralization of higher education and the strengthening of local capacities, contributing decisively to the equitable and sustainable development of the rural territories of Santander and the country.
