Seniors: between those who have retired and those who want to start a business in Colombia

“Currently, in Colombia, the elderly make up 14.5% of the population, by 2030 they will be 20%, and according to forecasts, they will be around 35% by 2060,” said Alejandro Chein, rector of the University of the Rosary.

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Before talking about business, we need to talk about the population that is engaged in this business. According to a recent study titled Challenges and opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship of older people, “The average rate of aging in the country (the percentage representing the number of young people in relation to the population over 60 years old) reached 40.9% from January to June 2023″, which “Armenia and Pereira achieved some of the highest records in Colombia. with 83.4% and 75.9%, respectively,” and that “this demographic transition invites us to work on developing public policies focused on older people.”

On this basis, we will move on to the second group of findings and conclusions: “42% of retirees in Colombia want to start a business and stay active”, “33% of older people stop getting a job because they retire or retire”. , and, in addition, under the industrial and business sector, it was found that “60% of companies are interested in promoting programs for the employment of older people and value the experience of older people.”

This report was published at a time when the country is discussing a number of structural reforms, including health care, labor and, more precisely, pensions. Oscar Barrera, a professor at the Universidad de los Andes, has already spoken about it: “The Colombian pension system needs reform. Low coverage, public spending concentrated on the least protected segments of the population and the inequality resulting from a system of unequal competition between Colpensiones and pension fund administrators create a bleak panorama for the majority of elderly people in the country.

But something is wrong here: who at retirement age would not want to go on vacation and live off what they have worked for their whole life? Why talk about financial independence when retirement should allow it? Well, it turned out that the reality in Colombia is not the same as in the Nordic countries, for example. In other words, as we reported in the analysis carried out in El Espectador, only one in four elderly pensioners received it in Colombia. That’s the reform, that’s the need to transform the system, expand coverage.

It is known that an average of about 65,000 Colombians retire each year in Colpensiones and 35,000 in funds, and according to Finance Minister Ricardo Bonilla, of the 25.7 million branches of the pension system in the country, only 40% are pension contributions . So, with this data, it becomes more reasonable why the elderly, in the share of 42%, see “entrepreneurship as an opportunity to gain financial independence”, as detailed in this study carried out by the University of Rosario and Porvenir.

“According to a study, in Colombia, the elderly make up 14.5% of the population, by 2030 they will make up 20%, and according to projections, they will be around 35% by 2060,” said Alejandro Chain, Rector of the University of Rosario. .

Currently, both the AFP and the educational center have an Observatory for the elderly, from where they understand this segment of the Colombian population and have advanced “learning, entrepreneurship and employment programs”. In June 2023, Bernardo Sánchez, Porvenir’s Marketing and Sustainable Development Manager, told El Espectador the details of what they were doing at the time and that sought to encourage the creation of businesses among the elderly: “These are the tools that we give to these people who are restless, in who have business ideas and who want to stay active in the community. This is a topic that we are working on in alliance with the Universidad del Rosario, where we are looking for those people who want to remain active in society and who want to return to what it is like to be at the university, so this is the Program that we are working on with 2020, we’ve made it part of something called the Elderly Entrepreneurship and Employability Observatory.”

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Miguel Largacha, president of Porvenir, said that through the mentioned observatory, training, entrepreneurship and employment programs will be strengthened, and the coverage and beneficiaries will be expanded. They will do this by creating a business incubation platform where learning tools will be found and it will be possible to participate in business round tables to promote and implement entrepreneurial projects. During 2023, more than 600 seniors benefited from this program and 243 businesses were developed that contribute to the Colombian business structure, the businessman said in a press release.

The businessman assured that “this alliance allowed us not only to gain knowledge about the elderly population in Colombia, but also to implement initiatives that encourage the active participation of this group in the social and productive life of the country.”

Among the joint plans for 2024 are “alliances with employment platforms with the aim of ensuring that Porvenir members who are close to retirement find job offers that will allow them to reach their retirement goal”, the Innova Mayor award is kept “to highlight the commitment of the Colombian organization in promoting the labor inclusion of seniors in their production chain, as workers or suppliers”, and “from the point of view of research, the Senior Inclusion Business Monitor will be developed, a tool to measure the impact of the entrepreneurship of seniors in the regions and their contribution to development, and to identify the benefits that companies receive from implementing workforce integration activities for this population.

Sánchez, in a conversation with El Espectador, has already described in detail: “There are many entrepreneurial programs and a lot of support for the inclusion of young people in work activities, but we forget about the elderly and let’s remember that the pyramid is inverted. , we are going There are more elderly people than young people in this country. We need to start paying attention to this population with the different problems they have. We work to understand this knowledge, and this is where we come from, providing tools and providing such support through training in development, an official program in which we collaborate with the University of Rosario. And the truth is that the life stories are beautiful, we even have people who never went to university.’

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The reality is that there are already some who manage to enjoy their retirement, but for those who have reached the age and haven’t achieved the fixed monthly income they so dreamed of, there are programs of this type jointly offered by organizations behind the Observatory for all of them.

But there is a third group, those who have received a pension, but want to continue doing business. “Becoming an entrepreneur never gets old. Ten years ago, when I was retired, I took a bird watching course. This led me to discover that there was a need for a support tool for recording field observations that also contained relevant background information, written in plain language and accessible to all people, youth and adults. Here’s how field notebook and the essential guide to bird watching. Now it’s a virtual store with all kinds of birdwatching goods,” Roger Vergara, then 69, an economist at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano and a marketing specialist at Universidad Los Andes told us. when we published his entrepreneurial story in Entrepreneurship and Leadership.

It is clear that opening a business has no age, that some do it out of necessity, others out of opportunity, and that in the midst of the reforms that Congress is working on, there is an obligation not only to ensure that work is formalized, but also that Colombians have access to retirement savings that, are undoubtedly the foundation of the retirement we all dream of.

If you’re looking for more stories about entrepreneurship, the creators are here. in Entrepreneurship and Leadership with Spectator.