Children who go to study at a school without power and that has been vandalized for not having the fence, located in the municipality of Santa Bárbara de Pinto, Magdalena; an educational institution in Boavita, Boyacá, which has more than 230 days of suspensions and extensions and which still lacks complementary works worth 260 million pesos for energization, enclosure, platform, ramp and embankment; and a school in Sogamoso, Boyacá, which should have been ready on October 10, 2021, but which currently does not have connection works for public services such as energy and sanitary and storm sewers.
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These are some of the cases that are collected in a warning that the comptroller general, Carlos Felipe Córdoba, made to the Ministry of National Education and the Educational Infrastructure Financing Fund (FFIE) by the risks of negative affectation to public interests due to the results that the National Plan for Educational Infrastructure (PNIE) has had up to now.
According to the warning of the control body, in the permanent monitoring of 19 projects by the Directorate of Information, Analysis and Immediate Reaction (Diari), 52 alerts were detected in 2021 due to delays in some FFIE worksas of February 11, 2022, it was identified that only seven fully completed and operational educational institutions had been delivered to the community, “which highlights recurrent situations that have prevented the progress and effective completion of other projects,” it reads in the official letter sent to the Minister of Education, María Victoria Angulo.
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The comptroller general, Carlos Felipe Córdoba, turned on alerts.
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These delays continue, the entity highlighted, despite the fact that the PNIE was declared a project of strategic importance through a 2015 Conpes document.
After meetings with the management of the FFIE, the Fiduciary Consortium, official letters addressed to the minister, as well as to the actors and interveners of the 19 projects, they had reported that they were very advanced, however, the Comptroller’s Office replied that these “are not They are in full functionality because there are pending complementary works, whether urban planning, electricity, enclosure or connection of public services.
On the other hand, the entity pointed out that according to the regulations, among the sources of financing of the FFIE are the co-financing agreements between the Ministry of Education and the Certified Territorial Entities (ETC), which are the municipalities and departments that can administer the educational service. in their jurisdictions, so that they finance the construction of the complementary works of the schools and colleges of the National Educational Infrastructure Plan.
“Despite this, in the cases analyzed it is evident how, on the one hand, the ETC evade their responsibilities derived from the signed agreements and on the other, the MEN-FFIE, does not fulfill its obligation to monitor the commitments contracted by the ETC, and is limited to delivering to these entities the infrastructure built within the framework of the contract signed by the trust consortium with the construction contractor, without verifying the effective completion of the related works and the definitive connection of public services, in charge of the ETC, which allow the proper functioning and security of the entire institution”, warned the Comptroller.
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The FFIE, in turn, assured that “there will be no detriment”, and highlighted that the Duque Government has made progress in the works.
However, among the cases analyzed by the control body, there were difficulties and delays in the completion of the PNIE, derived from non-compliance with inter-administrative agreements, mainly due to aspects of the financing of the ETC, the lack of management for the hiring of works and the lack of follow-up to the signed contracts, which, the agency highlighted, ends up allowing the contracts to be breached.
“Thus, of the 52 PNIE projects -as of February 11, 2022- there is only evidence of the delivery of 7 fully completed educational institutions as a functional construction unit, with all the ‘complementary works’, which allows them to have the capacity to satisfy the need to provide the educational service that is the object of the aforementioned project”, says the warning.
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Works continue in several institutions in the country.
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Educational Infrastructure Financing Fund
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The document also indicates that for this reason 3,245,455 inhabitants of the different regions of the country are being affected. where the remaining projects are developed, “which at the beginning of the school year, do not have the infrastructure that guarantees an educational process in environments with elementary conditions of hygiene (drinking water, basic sanitation), functionality (electricity), accessibility ( ramps and elevators, platforms, internal and access roads) and security (enclosures, compliance with technical standards for school safety and risk prevention), necessary for the effective start-up of educational institutions.
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In addition to this social affectation, the Comptroller’s Office said that an “imminent” risk of loss of public resources for 97,049’872,335 pesos and the affectation of public assets, “not only due to the delays in the delivery of the works, but also due to the potential receipt of non-functional infrastructure due to the lack of complementary works, and/or the deterioration derived from the lack of maintenance of the built structures (…) which demonstrates the high economic connotation”, concluded the entity.
FFIE: ‘There will be no detriment’
The FFIE points out that since the beginning of the current government they made a diagnosis in which they identified that 70 percent of the total projects were at high and medium-high risk of non-compliance, which led them to adopt measures in recent years to guarantee the culmination of the 540 schools considered in the PNIE.
“We have gone from 40 infrastructures completed on August 8, 2018 to 261 on April 24, 2021,” says the entity. They add that they are “guaranteed the delivery of functional works that would not under any circumstances constitute a detriment to public resources.”
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*With reporting from Vida’s newsroom
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