- Bogota is implementing an integrated early childhood development system to improve coordination, quality, and access to services.
- With support from the IDB, the city is strengthening governance, quality assurance, and interoperable data systems to deliver more integrated care.
- Bogota's experience offers practical lessons for governments across Latin America seeking to build stronger early childhood development systems.
More than 560,000 children under the age of six live in Bogota. Yet nearly 47% do not have access to early childhood education services, such as preschools or childcare centers. This is not necessarily because families do not want to enroll their children, but because services do not always reach the areas where they are most needed due to gaps in coverage, quality, or institutional coordination. These gaps disproportionately affect the most vulnerable households.
To address this challenge, the city approved a decree establishing a major structural reform: the District System for Integrated Early Childhood Development (SDAIPI, for its initials in Spanish). The system aims to build an institutional framework capable of coordinating sectors, integrating information, and strengthening service quality to ensure that every child in Bogota has access to the comprehensive care they need to reach their full potential.
Led by the District Secretariat of Education (SED) and the District Secretariat of Social Integration (SDIS), with technical and financial support from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), this effort brings together technical and political stakeholders to ensure that the reform moves beyond legislation and is sustained over time. It is a truly collective effort in support of early childhood development.
In this blog post, we explore the three pillars on which Bogota is building a system that places children at its center.
Pillar 1: Coordination
One of the main challenges facing early childhood development systems is fragmentation. Policies in areas such as health, education, and social protection are often implemented with limited coordination, making it difficult to monitor each child's journey across services.
To address this challenge, the SDAIPI establishes an intersectoral and interinstitutional governance model that brings together not only the sectors traditionally responsible for early childhood development—such as health, education, protection, and care—but also other key actors, including public safety, child participation mechanisms, and national government agencies.
The system also engages the private sector, academia, civil society organizations, family compensation funds, families, and communities. The goal is to build a shared network of responsibility capable of delivering more comprehensive, coordinated, and timely responses for every child, regardless of the institution through which they first access services.
Pillar 2: Quality
The quality of early learning and caregiving experiences is one of the most important factors in promoting healthy early childhood development. Although Bogota already had quality standards for early childhood education services, these focused primarily on infrastructure and human resources, without incorporating systematic mechanisms for self-assessment and continuous improvement.
To strengthen this dimension, the SDAIPI proposes a quality assurance model that establishes new quality requirements for public, private, and mixed early childhood education providers, together with tools for ongoing monitoring and continuous improvement. The model places particular emphasis on the quality of interactions between educators and children, recognizing that these relationships are fundamental to learning, well-being, and socioemotional development.
The model also seeks to respond more effectively to Bogota's cultural, ethnic, and territorial diversity.
At the same time, Bogota is strengthening its Inspection, Monitoring, and Oversight model through a preventive, risk-based approach grounded in quality standards. This approach is designed to support and strengthen service providers through continuous, systematic, and timely guidance.
Pillar 3: Data
When information systems cannot communicate with one another, it becomes difficult to identify which children are receiving services, which are not, and where access gaps persist.
To overcome this challenge, Bogota is developing an interoperable early childhood information system that will integrate records from different agencies and enable child-level tracking throughout each child's service journey.
As part of this effort, the city is developing a Functional One-Stop Window (Ventanilla Única Funcional) that will identify each child, track the services they receive, generate alerts when children are not receiving services, and coordinate the range of social programs available to families. The system will also consolidate information on service providers and strengthen quality management.
Both the SDAIPI model and the collaborative process through which it has been developed offer valuable lessons for governments across Latin America seeking to build integrated early childhood development systems, particularly in contexts where coordination, service quality, and monitoring remain major challenges. Bogota's experience demonstrates that strengthening coordination among institutions, sharing information, and establishing common objectives can help ensure that more children receive timely access to the services they need to thrive.
At the IDB, we have supported this effort through technical cooperation, financing, and specialized technical assistance, helping strengthen the institutional capacities and coordination mechanisms that make more integrated service delivery possible. The findings presented in this study reinforce the importance of continuing to invest in high-quality policies and services during the earliest years of life, a critical period for children's development and future learning.