The Open Society Foundations in Colombia

The Open Society Foundations began supporting civil society groups in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s, subsequently opening offices in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. In Colombia and across the region, we use our grant making, advocacy, human rights litigation, and impact investments to reinforce democratic change and participation. We seek to transform the growing public interest in countering inequality, corruption, violence, and the climate crisis into powerful initiatives and alliances to build open and peaceful societies.

Nine Facts About Colombia and the Open Society Foundations

1. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Open Society donated more than $8 million to groups working with Colombians hardest hit by the pandemic. 
2. Open Society helped fund the launch of a program in the city of Bogotá that makes social insurance and other benefits available to women working as household or as domestic care workers—the first of its kind in Latin America, benefiting around 12,000 people.
3. Data analysis by anticorruption groups partly funded by Open Society helped expose the scale of the 2018 “Hemophilia Cartel”—a massive government health care fraud that cost the northern province of Córdoba over $11 million. 
4. As part of our commitment to racial justice, Open Society continues to support organizations working with communities of African descent in Colombia’s Pacific region, including Afrodes, the Buenaventura Chamber of Commerce, the Center for Afrodiasporic Studies, and the Manos Visibles Foundation.
5. Our work with Colombia’s government has included funding expert policy advice to support its decision to grant legal status and social inclusion benefits to more than half a million people who have fled the economic and political crisis in neighboring Venezuela.
6. Open Society has supported successful legal efforts by rural communities challenging the aerial spraying of glyphosate, a herbicide used to destroy coca crops that some studies have linked to human health and environmental problems. 
7. Open Society has supported the inclusion and participation of civil society in the negotiation, and the ongoing implementation, of the series of peace agreements reached between the government and former rebel groups in 2016.
8. As part of our efforts to advance climate justice, Open Society supported successful legal action by the human rights group Dejusticia and a group of Colombian children that led to a Supreme Court ruling protecting the Amazon rainforest and recognizing and strengthening the rights of its local communities to stop deforestation.
9. Open Society has invested in a private company, Symplifica, to launch an online platform in Colombia that makes it easier for domestic workers and people who employ them to legally register employment contracts and to manage their payments.