Valeria Ortiz Jaramillo, founder of Colombiando, is a Spring 2026 recipient of the Navab Social Impact Fellowship Fund and a $25K social winner in the 2026 Harvard President's Innovation Challenge. She recently spoke with the Harvard Innovation Labs about her work supporting teachers and students in rural one-room schools across Colombia, bringing effective instructional models to some of the country's most remote communities.
What inspired you to start your venture?
"Early childhood education in these hard-to-reach areas happens every 15 days," the Secretary of Early Childhood from a municipality in Antioquia, Colombia, told me. Education every 15 days. I couldn't believe it.
After saying this, the Secretary invited us to visit the municipality of El Carmen de Viboral to see the work being done by teachers in remote communities. After hours of travel by car and then by horse through the mountains, we arrived at a small school with just one classroom. Inside, 17 students from kindergarten to fifth grade were learning together, and Estefanía was the only teacher responsible for all of them. It was the first one-room school I had ever seen.
What amazed us most was the role of the teacher: one person teaching all subjects to six different grades. When I asked Estefanía where she lived, she told me she stayed there from Monday to Friday, far away from her family.
We stayed there for four hours and promised Estefanía we would come back to visit her again. Four months later, we returned to that same school to run our first summer camp for her students. We didn't arrive with solutions. We arrived with a question: How do students learn here? And that question eventually became Colombiando.
What impact are you hoping to achieve?
In five years, Colombiando reaches 5,000 rural one-room schools in Colombia, enabling teachers to teach effectively using an instructional model designed specifically for multigrade classrooms so students can learn at grade level. One-room schools are recognized as a unique and valuable education system, becoming visible and better understood across the country.
What's the hardest part about building this?
In April 2024, I decided to quit my job and leave the city to focus fully on Colombiando. I had no savings. The only way I could support myself was by tutoring math online at night. For a full year I worked on Colombiando without earning a salary. Taking that risk was one of the most difficult decisions I have made, but also the one I appreciate the most.
In practical terms, the hardest part has been finding funding. It is challenging to raise resources when you are just starting, especially when your work is not driven by big numbers but by supporting teachers and students who, for many people and even for the education system itself, have remained invisible.
Have you always been involved in this work or did you transition into it?
I studied engineering and halfway through my degree I realized I also wanted to study education. I ended up completing a double degree and, since graduating, I have worked in education. I first worked at a very privileged city school. Later, I moved to an outdoor learning organization where I was the early childhood coordinator and sociocultural projects coordinator. In that role I had the opportunity to travel to many regions of Colombia, where I began to see rural one-room schools and connect with the teachers who work there.
Last year, I realized I still did not fully understand what was happening inside these classrooms, so I made a big decision. I left the city to conduct participatory research by volunteering for a full year as an assistant teacher in hard-to-reach one-room schools in three different regions of Colombia, spending four months in each place. Living and working in those classrooms helped me truly understand rural multigrade education and made me realize that supporting these teachers is the work I want to dedicate my life to.
What's the craziest (or most unexpected) moment so far?
One of the craziest moments was when Diana, the teacher of the one-room school where I was volunteering, was absent for a whole week and I had to take over the class. She had nothing planned, so I decided to create a project called the Community Map Project. We worked on it all week. The older students led the project. The middle grades counted the people in the community and placed the houses on the map according to the cardinal points. The youngest students designed the sun and helped choose natural and recycled materials.
That Friday afternoon I was sitting at home when my neighbor Mariana came in. Her mom asked her what they had done at school that week. Mariana first said, "Nothing." Her mom laughed and asked, "Nothing? Really?" Mariana replied, "Well…we made a whole map of the community. I built houses with Elian [kindergarten], Mateo [third grade], and Esteban [fifth grade]. We drew, colored, and pasted them on the map. I don't even have homework for Monday." Five minutes later, when the sun was going down, Mariana said to her mom, "Mom, look! The sun goes down in the west. We placed this on the map."
That moment stayed with me. When learning is engaging and experiential, sometimes students feel like they did "nothing," when in reality they were learning more than expected.
What's been one of the coolest moments on your journey?
One of the coolest moments in my journey happened when I entered Liliana's classroom, a one-room school three hours away from Bogotá. On the wall I saw a routine where students marked their attendance by finding their name tag and placing it on the board. Then they took a drawing of themselves and placed it in a section that showed how they were feeling that day. It was a simple strategy that helped young students recognize their names, take responsibility for attendance, and express their emotions.
I asked Liliana where the idea had come from. She told me she had learned it through Colombiando's newsletter. The strategy had originally been created by Estefanía, the teacher in the northern part of Colombia. The two teachers had never met. They work alone in their classrooms, hundreds of kilometers apart. But in that moment I realized that Colombiando was beginning to connect teachers who had always worked in isolation, allowing them to learn from each other across the country.
What lesson have you learned that you wish to share with other social impact founders?
When we first started, we built a library in the first one-room school we visited because we thought families and students needed books. After six months, no one had used it. It was a solution to a problem we had invented, not one the community had expressed.
That experience taught us an important lesson: Before designing a solution, take a step back and ask whether the problem you are trying to solve is actually a real need in the community or an assumption you are making from the outside. Understand and connect first, before trying to solve anything.
