Collaborating closely with regional leaders, local stakeholders, and partners, Ms. Latorre will focus on achieving measurable outcomes that benefit both the people of the LAC region and the planet.

“By building partnerships and alliances with relevant players, we will be able to maximize our impact.” – Lyana Latorre.

“I am thrilled Lyana will lead The Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to advance people-centered climate solutions for sustainable development across Latin America and the Caribbean,” said Elizabeth Yee, Executive Vice President for Programs at The Rockefeller Foundation. “With Bogotá joining our offices in Bangkok and Nairobi, we are strengthening our collective voice in the Global South and fostering collaborations that align with local and regional priorities, while delivering on global goals.”

Ms. Latorre joins The Rockefeller Foundation as it continues its $1 billion commitment to advance the global climate transition and help ensure everyone can participate in it.

“I am thrilled at this opportunity to consolidate and lead new initiatives for The Rockefeller Foundation in Latin America and the Caribbean. By building partnerships and alliances with relevant players, we will be able to maximize our impact. As someone who is from the region, I am particularly motivated to help scale solutions in communities where needs and opportunities are abundant,” said Ms. Latorre.

With nearly three decades of experience in investment banking, environmental, and social impact, Ms. Latorre spent eight years at Arcos Dorados, the world’s largest independent McDonald’s franchisee, operating in 20 LAC countries and territories. During her tenure, Ms. Latorre served as Director for Latin America Ronald McDonald House Charities before becoming Director of Corporate Social Engagement and member of the Management Team, reporting directly to the Executive Chairman. In this role, she developed and led the company’s youth employment strategy, which was later adopted globally by McDonald’s Corporation. Additionally, she grew Ronald McDonald House Charities programs in the region from 21 to 63.

Ms. Latorre began her career as an investment banker with Bank Boston-Robertson Stephens in Boston and later with Nortel Networks in San Francisco before returning to her native Colombia.

Fluent in both Spanish and English, she graduated Summa Cum Laudea from Colegio de Estudios Superiores de Administración (CESA) with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, specializing in Corporate Finance. She later made history as CESA’s first female board director. A dedicated volunteer, she has contributed extensively to the Colombian Red Cross, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and initiatives advancing animal welfare in Colombia. Currently, she serves on the Board of Ayuda en Acción, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to driving social impact and humanitarian projects.

The Rockefeller Foundation Invests in LAC

With more than a century of investing in the region and convening some of its brightest minds, The Rockefeller Foundation set up its first LAC office during the late 1930s, focusing on improving health and agriculture sectors, developing rural communities, and establishing universities. Although its physical presence in the region ended in the early 2000s, the Foundation’s investments have continued, with ongoing projects across an initial ten countries: Barbados, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Trinidad and Tobago.

In August 2024, The Rockefeller Foundation announced plans to open a new LAC Regional Office in 2025 in Colombia, which comes at a pivotal moment for the region. Home to 669 million people across 33 diverse countries, LAC is uniquely vulnerable to climate change because of its geographic location, persistent inequality, and reliance on climate-sensitive economic activity. According to the United Nations, climate change threatens the lives and livelihoods of 41 million people in LAC.

The region is already experiencing extreme weather events, including mega-droughts, extreme rainfall, heatwaves, rising sea levels, and deforestation. Despite these challenges, LAC is also endowed with valuable natural assets that position it to play a significant role in the global green transition, including an estimated 50% of the world’s biodiversity and a significant share of critical minerals. In addition, when Brazil hosts the United Nations Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30) later this year, it will mark the fifth time in 30 years that an international climate meeting returns to the LAC region.

Headline Image: Lyana Latorre. Photo credit: The Rockefeller Foundation.

The purpose of this call is share knowledge and experiences in the topic of housing and urban development between South Korea and LAC region.

The selected scholars are expected to conduct an IDB-KRIHS joint research project and field work. The field work will be conducted, for a period of two weeks, in KRIHS’s headquarters located in Anyang City (Seoul Metropolitan area).

The IDB and KRIHS launchcall submission deadline is May 29, 2016

Applicants from the LAC region can be accredited scholars or professors from institutions of higher learning and advanced academic research or universities, or accomplished government officials with a position of deputy director or higher with a keen intellectual interest and demonstrated academic or professional excellence in the topic of housing and urban development in the LAC region. Researchers from regions other than LAC may submit proposals if they have considerable experience and exceptional knowledge of countries in the LAC region.

The call for research on urban planning must focus on metropolitan governance, special economic zone and land management. Individual researchers and scholars are encouraged to present proposals that build upon their existing work only if it is related to any of the three subject areas for this program.

In addition the research proposals must be submitted in English, not exceed three pages, and include the following items:

• Executive summary
• Research question
• Proposal objectives (general and specific)
• Justification
• Theoretical framework
• Hypothesis
• Methodology
• Data and information sources
• Time framework
• Existing research that will be incorporated into this research project

All applicants should also submit their Curriculum Vitae in English not exceeding two pages.

The proposal and supporting documentation mentioned in section 4 should be submitted simultaneously no later than May 29, 2016 to: Andres G. Blanco B. (ablanco@iadb.org) and Federica Volpe (federicav@iadb.org), with the following subject line: CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Visiting Scholarship Program 2016.

For more detail to participate and the rules on this call for research proposal, interested participants must visit the document in English and the Spanish or visit www.iadb.org/desarrollourbano

Finance Colombia invited Anurag Srivistava, member of the Global Sourcing research team at Everest Group, to recap Everest Group’s findings with particular emphasis on forecasts regarding Columbia’s emerging leadership in the GIC landscape.

The global GIC locations landscape is undergoing a major shift

The GIC market witnessed a revival in set-up of new centers in 2014 after sluggish activity over 2011-2013 (see chart below). This was led by improved macroeconomic sentiment in North America as well as Europe, especially in the second half of 2014.

The first quarter of 2015 continued that trend – with 24 new GICs set up across the world. What is also notable in the above chart is the changing mix of locations being leveraged for new GICs. While the Asia Pacific (APAC) region is still the largest destination, it is slowly losing share to other regions. In particular, Nearshore Europe and Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) now account for a considerable share of new center set-ups.

Most leading enterprise adopters of global sourcing already have large scale centers in traditional offshore destinations (e.g., India and Philippines) and are looking to diversify their footprint to other regions to address concentration risks, support niche work or work that requires a fair degree of cultural or regulatory understanding (e.g., product development, anti-money laundering), support work in multiple languages, or offer same-time support to business (e.g., for contact center services or agile development).

Additionally, some of these enterprises are also looking to expand their businesses into these nearshore markets (e.g., the LAC region offers a lucrative, untapped business opportunity to North American companies owing to being an emerging market with promising growth). In such cases, a GIC also serves as a foothold in untested markets to understand regulations and local culture; build connections with government, service providers, and academia; and establish local leadership that can lead the company’s business growth in the market.

Colombia is well-poised within the LAC region to become a GIC hub

Within the LAC region, Colombia is attractively poised to lead the next wave of growth for GICs. The chart below provides a landscape of some mature markets for GICs in the LAC region.

Following from the above chart, for companies looking to set up or expand in LAC to serve the region or North America, Colombia presents an interesting opportunity owing to it being the only viable option that presents substantial scalability across multiple functions at a reasonable unit cost and without the challenges of intense competition. Additionally, it offers the following:

• Large domestic market opportunity (third largest by population and fourth largest by GDP), poised for healthy growth
• Attractive maturity of domestic/regional services market across IT, business processes, contact center, knowledge services, and engineering/R&D
• Stable politics, economy, and regulatory/legal environment
• Third most business-friendly and the leading reforming country in Latin America according to Doing Business 2013[i]
• Proximity to North America (compared to options such as Argentina, Chile, or Uruguay)
• Good quality of life and safety/security in major cities

Key growth areas for Colombia GICs

In Everest Group’s view, Colombia will increasingly play one or more of the following roles in the GIC portfolios of companies:

Support local/domestic (Colombian) operations of (North American or European) multinationals

This is likely to be the most prominent area of growth for the GIC market in Colombia. As more companies expand their businesses into the country, lured by the large untapped market and high rate of growth, they will also need to support functions such as finance, HR, IT, and procurement locally. Since tier-2/3 Colombian cities offer attractive operating costs compared to other regional options, these enterprises are likely to prefer a Colombian GIC over supporting Colombia from another country in the region.

Regional delivery center to support Latin America operations

Colombia is also poised to see substantial growth from GICs supporting regional (LAC) operations of multinationals. The primary driver for this growth is that Colombian cities offer potential savings over many source markets in Latin America – including Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, Central America, and Brazil. The other drivers of this trend include the attractive maturity of the Colombian IT and business process sector and the central location and good regional connectivity of most major cities in Colombia.

Multifunctional GICs supporting regional delivery will be spread across Bogota and tier-2/3 cities (e.g., Cali and Medellin), depending upon the mix of services and scale they aim to support.

Small-scale center for delivery to North America in English language

Colombian cities (especially Bogota and the ones in Northern Colombia – Bucaramanga, Barranquilla, and Cartagena) are also going to witness traction in English-language (or bilingual – English/Spanish) delivery of voice and non-voice business processes. This is driven by attractive cost structures, proficiency in English, and cultural affinity towards the U.S. in these cities. Given that the English proficiency of Colombian talent is typically lower than other options in the region, Colombian GICs supporting this segment are likely to be small-scale and not large hubs.

Spoke for larger hub locations in Latin America, serving regional (Latin America) demand

Companies will also eye Colombia as a secondary/spoke location supporting a larger primary/hub location in LAC to support regional/domestic demand. This model helps companies hedge environment and talent risks by diversification.

Challenges and key imperatives for stakeholders

Awareness of the business process services (BPS) sector as a career

The most significant challenge GICs are likely to face is the lack of awareness amongst students, academicians, and even government agencies of the opportunities and career paths that the BPS sector has to offer. This leads to most students (potential employees) equating a BPS sector job with a contact center career, and often finding it unattractive.

GICs along with the other stakeholders (government, academia) will need to come together to spread awareness among students and the population in general about the variety of careers in the IT-BPS sector and the rewards it can bring to society from rising employment and increasing spending power.

Incentives and Free Trade Zone (FTZ) regime

Colombia currently offers a differential taxation regime for the services sector, especially for services exports (FTZ regime) – depending on the mix of work that companies intend to support in Colombia, they could find the FTZ regime more or less attractive. The current process for determining the best route for investment and the associated qualification process is considered too complex.

At the same time, incentives schemes for investment into the services sector are relatively less attractive compared to those in other destinations in the region.

Governments at the central/federal, province, and city levels will need to re-evaluate the effectiveness of existing incentives and consider an overhaul of the current tax and incentives regimes keeping in view the demands of the IT-BPS sector and incentives offered by other countries in the region.

Proficiency in English language and orientation towards supporting North America

Most tier-2/3 cities in Colombia offer lower levels of English proficiency than key service delivery destinations in the LAC region. This is because, historically, Colombia has not been oriented towards supporting North America, and English has not been a prominent part of the educational system. For example, most higher education institutes in the smaller cities do not offer courses with English as the medium of instruction.

Although the industry and other stakeholders are already making efforts to impart English language training to interns or employees, this needs a significant nation-wide policy-level push.

[i] World Bank. 2013. Doing Business 2013: Smarter Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. DOI: 10.1596/978-0-8213-9615-5. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

In 2015, the Initiative will provide up to $7 million in grants to finance regional public goods (RPGs) that are produced collectively by a minimum of three IDB borrowing-member countries. Even though the Initiative is open to the promotion of RPGs in any development area covered by the IDB, alignment with the IDB’s operational priorities is a selection criterion. The other two selection criteria are the value added of a regional (vs. national) approach to addressing a development challenge or opportunity, and the prospects of sustaining the benefits of regional collective action beyond the support of the Initiative.

The Initiative is the Bank’s most prominent grant instrument to support intra-regional cooperation and the collective design of development solutions in LAC. Demand for its resources has intensified in tandem with the increasing importance of multi or bilateral South-South cooperation (SSC) in the development agenda of most LAC countries. The interest in SSC among the Bank´s borrowing members is a reflection of the fact that the region is a source of innovative development solutions that can be shared and replicated throughout LAC and in other parts of the developing world. Since 2004, the RPG Initiative has financed 114 projects, investing a total of more than $90 million.

Information regarding the 2015 Call for Proposals can be accessed here. All proposals must be presented in accordance with the Call for Proposals Guidelines and must be submitted online before 11:59 pm EST, April 9th, 2015.