Bogotá became the first city in Latin America to issue internal public debt social bonds to be traded on the stock exchange to finance social programmes. The event marks a new milestone in the public securities market.

The District placed 162,271 million pesos through the auction mechanism, through the Colombian Stock Exchange (BVC), which will be used specifically to finance the Jóvenes a la U programme, with which the District Administration will provide higher education until 2024 to 20,000 young people from strata 1, 2 and 3, residents of Bogota.

The placement will be made in four tranches. The first, which took place by the end of 2021, guarantees more than 5,500 places for this programme, of the total of 20,000 guaranteed for the next three years. The success of the placement is reflected in the fact that the bonds were oversubscribed 2.4 times.

With the Jóvenes a la U programme, the District seeks to increase the number of high school graduates accessing higher education. Its beneficiaries will receive a semester’s economic support of one minimum wage to support their maintenance during the training stage, and to guarantee their permanence until the end of the corresponding academic programme.

The final award was 103,000 million pesos in 12-year bonds, indexed to the CPI plus 4.35% AE (Annual Effective Rate) and 59,271 million pesos in 20-year bonds, in UVR at a rate of 4.53% AE (Annual Effective Rate).

The most demanding investors are seeing in Bogota an opportunity to promote education, pioneering a sustainable alternative that commits them to concrete results to achieve these objectives.