Colombia is one of the countries within the OECD with the fewest public employees

Of the 38 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Colombia, along with Japan, has the fewest employees in the public sector. The information was revealed in the Government at a Glance 2021 report, recently revealed by the international entity.

According to figures taken from the Public Employment Information and Management System (SIGEP) and the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), in Colombia only 6.20% of employees work in the public sector. This means that, compared to the OECD average, we are 10.8 percentage points below.

Although this would be thought to be due to the amount of bureaucratic processes that exist in Colombia, the Government says that these channels have been diminished and the country is moving towards optimizing its contracting methodologies and thus linking more people to the public sector.

In fact, it should be noted that the OECD report states that Colombia does not have high levels of bureaucracy. Even with nations outside the organization, the country still has very low levels compared to South Korea (8.13%), Turkey (13.06%) and Poland (17.25%). On the contrary, the United States, Spain and Mexico are among the countries with the least bureaucracy.

While this report points to a worrying aspect for the country, it should also be mentioned that the OECD has recently exalted the country for other achievements in the education and technology sectors.

On the one hand, it was indicated that advances in the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially to streamline processes within public sector agencies, consolidate Colombia as a benchmark for this technology. This is taking into account that the establishment of legal and ethical frameworks, automated decision-making, the promotion of fairness and security in the public sector have been promoted.

It was noted that in this report, Colombia shares the first places of exaltation with countries such as Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. They were followed by Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Peru, according to each category.

In addition, management was rescued at the country level to form the Mission of Experts in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is a multi-stakeholder group made up of ten national and international experts, which meets regularly to assess the different dimensions of AI in the country. In addition, its management also focuses on giving concrete recommendations in the short, medium and long term.

On the other hand, on March 24, international representatives of the OECD called the management of the Colombian education sector as “successful and effective”, since it managed to support its processes in digital media during the pandemic. It was detailed that during this time the relevant skills in the labor market have been strengthened to train children and young people in machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, source code programming, creative industries and digital animation. In addition, courses on integrated services and relational databases were offered.

He also mentioned the training of 107,000 teachers in skills and the adoption of the historical policy of equity: “to bring public higher education, free of charge, to the most vulnerable people and the emerging middle class, reaching 97% of public higher enrollment in our country,” said the Government.

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