Colombia´s National Agency to Overcome Extreme Poverty– ANSPE (http://www.anspe.gov.co/) is responsible for the Government’s strategy for ending extreme poverty. ANSPE aligns public offer, private investment and social innovation initiatives so that they target Colombia´s poorest families. The agency identifies the needs of each family and works on providing relevant solutions, in partnership with local authorities, government institutions, social organizations and the private sector. More than 9,000 social workers work with ANSPE, accomplish its mission. They accompany the families every day, and connect them with public and private offer.

In 2015, ANSPE’s Social Innovation Direction carried out the Beatriz Linares Cantillo Award to recognize and spread innovative initiatives implemented by social workers during the process of accompaniment to the families. The Beatriz Linares Cantillo Award is the first Social Innovation mapping strategy of the organisation. It was designed as a contest to motivate social workers to postulate the creative solutions they are coming up with to solve the families’ needs when the state or the private sector cannot do it. The award recognized the effort made by social workers and encourages others to follow their lead.

From April to May 2015, 146 initiatives developed by social workers were postulated and mapped for the Beatriz Linares Cantillo Award in the following categories: (i) Best initiative that strengthens social capital (ii) Best initiative that helps accomplish social goals. From May to June 2015, the evaluation process identified that at least 46 of these initiatives had a high potential of replication. Ten of these initiatives were awarded as the best practices, five for each mentioned category. A third award was given to the people´s favorite initiative; ANSPE received a total of 8.882 electronic votes for this competition. One brochure was published describing the winner initiatives (http://tinyurl.com/q9c6dgn), it reached 1.763 people from Facebook. The brochure was downloaded from Issuu 1.341 times from different parts of the world, including Colombia, United States, Italy, London, Brazil, Chile, Panama and China. ANSPE’s Social Innovation Direction is currently documenting each winning initiative to encourage other social workers to replicate these good practices.

Until now, the main results from Beatriz Linares Cantillo Award are:

• The positioning and promotion of social innovation as a key strategy to overcome extreme poverty. The award itself is an exercise of Social Innovation, as it constitutes the first map of good practices in Social Innovation directly accomplished by ANSPE.
• The award consolidates the idea of positioning social workers as social innovation agents to overcome extreme poverty. Social workers know local realities, which are key to the development of relevant, low cost and high social impact solutions.
• The award built a bank of good practices in social innovation by social workers, which are likely to be replicated through the Social Innovation Direction and other entities of Colombia´s social sector.