Fundacion Juanfe

Juan Felipe Gomez Escobar Foundation seeks to improve the quality of life of adolescent mothers and infants living in extreme poverty in the city of Cartagena. At its beginnings, the Foundation focused on reducing infant mortality. In 2005, the core focus changed to the empowerment of teen mothers, recognizing that when poor girls become mothers during adolescence, it is the key factor that deepens poverty.

The foundation fulfils its purpose by providing comprehensive care in terms of health, psychological and emotional support, as well as technical training to generate a stable income and break the poverty cycle. Since its inception and the adoption of operational best practices in 2002, 4,300 babies have been treated and saved, and the infant mortality rate has decreased by 80% in the city.

The Juan Felipe Medical Center has attended to more than 200,000 patients since October 2005, with an average of 1,500 patients per month. Additionally, since the creation of the Employment and Entrepreneurship Office in 2012, 1,600 teenage mothers have found a job and are currently generating an income. The Foundation's business and intervention model, called 360 Degrees intervention, is innovative because it is approaching the teenage pregnancy problem in a holistic way: not focusing on only one dimension of the problem but on an array of dimensions – health, nutrition, job training, empowerment, psychology. By working all these dimensions together, the foundation is helping teenage mothers have a higher probability of finding and keeping a steady job, therefore breaking the poverty cycle.