Colombia. The Colombian government headed by President Iván Duque, businessmen and representatives of the production unions participated in the signing ceremony of the 12 Pacts for Growth and Job Creation, which took place at the Teatro Colón in Bogotá.
With these agreements, it seeks to boost the growth of the national economy by supporting entrepreneurship, strengthening the industry and internationalization in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors; Orange Economy; Software and Information Technology (IT); cocoa; tourism; meat; processed foods; fashion; chemicals; agroforestry; transportation, and construction industries, which were prioritized in the first round of construction of the Pacts.
These were developed through dialogues between public sector entities, unions and entrepreneurs, with the aim of enhancing economic dynamics through targeting, scaling and the development of actions and tools that allow eliminating the identified bottlenecks, through short- and medium-term commitments from both the public and private sectors.
The Software and IT Sector Growth Pact was divided into four components: competitive environment, productivity, innovation and investment. MinTIC is responsible for the development of initiatives related to: the formation of working groups for the implementation of the law on modernization of the ICT sector; regulate Public-Private Partnerships to encourage investment, and develop a program that encourages the implementation of advanced technologies to sophisticate processes and services in the actors of the e-commerce value chain.
Likewise, it will create the sectoral Digital Laboratories program to solve the structural needs of the sectors through the use of technologies; and will hold a technical table to define the talent needs of the industry, for which the relevance of the different models of formal education, vocational training and for work will be analyzed. The goal is for this sector to increase its growth by more than US$30 million by 2022, exporting more than US$340,000, with a capacity to absorb up to 80,000 new talents in the labor market.
As for the BPO sector, it currently concentrates about 10% of the country's services GDP, generates 501,854 direct jobs and contributes approximately 11% of services exports. Additionally, it concentrates 6.7% of the service companies registered in the country. These Compacts will ensure that, over the next four years, the country doubles one or more of the indicators of these sectors so that they raise their contribution to national prosperity.
The construction of these initiatives was carried out in working groups in which 45 unions and more than 60 public sector entities were represented. The participants, after identifying the difficulties and the main challenges of each sector, agreed on commitments to strengthen the country's productive apparatus.
The Pacts for Growth will be monitored periodically, both by the National Government and by the private sector, to ensure their compliance and success, with a view to strengthening production, employment generation, sales at the national level and exports to world markets.
