Bogotá.- The director of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), Piedad Urdinola, stated in an interview with EFE that poverty reduction is the main social achievement of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, although she warned that the next government will face the challenge of closing deep inequality gaps.
“Poverty. Because without a doubt, some very great efforts were made,” he said when referring to Petro’s greatest achievement, whose term will conclude on August 7th.
For Urdinola, the figures show that the main social result of the four-year term was the reduction of poverty, and in that sense, the DANE highlights that monetary poverty fell from 31.8% in 2024 to 28% in 2025, the lowest level since the measurement has existed, while extreme monetary poverty dropped from 11.7% to 9.6%.
Likewise, the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, went from 0.551 to 0.531, its largest reduction in a recent year.
Reduction of inequality
However, Urdinola, who will leave office next Tuesday, two weeks before Petro’s presidency ends, stressed that these advances do not mean that Colombia has overcome its structural problems, as the largest gaps remain concentrated in rural areas and among historically excluded populations.
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Urdinola maintained that these results are mainly due to the improvement in labor income and not to the increase in state transfers, since “monetary subsidies were decreasing after the pandemic” and what really increased “was the labor income of households.”
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“When we begin to disaggregate the figures, very significant differences appear. Households headed by women show higher levels of poverty, as do those headed by Afro-descendant, indigenous, and peasant populations,” he/she explained.
In that sense, he argued that the reduction of inequality must become a priority for the Government of the president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, and considered that one of the main contributions of the Petro Administration was precisely to provide the State with better tools to measure those inequalities.
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Institutional legacy
When taking stock of her administration, Urdinola highlighted the strengthening of statistical production with a differential and intersectional approach, incorporated into Law 2335 of 2023.
Based on that regulation, he stated that official statistics must incorporate, whenever possible, variables regarding gender, ethnic background, disability, peasantry, youth, and diversities, with the purpose of making visible inequalities that were historically not measured.
“Today the gaps are already visible in the figures and that allows for designing better public policies,” he stated.
The official also emphasized the creation of the mandatory census cycle, which establishes by law the periodic conduct of economic, agricultural, population and housing, and mining censuses, all with a ten-year periodicity.
In his view, that reform will prevent the country from going decades without updating strategic information again, as happened with the National Urban Economic Census, which was carried out 34 years after the previous one.
Actionable statistics
Urdinola also highlighted the strengthening of statistical production based on administrative records, a model that will reduce the burden on citizens and businesses and allow for faster results.
As an example, he cited the recent National Urban Economic Census, which characterized more than 2.5 million economic units, of which more than 41,000 were incorporated through administrative records, becoming the first hybrid economic census carried out by the country.
The director also pointed out that the most difficult figure produced by DANE during her tenure was the one related to the commercial sexual exploitation of children and adolescents.
Thanks to the joint work with the Prosecutor’s Office, the entity managed to reconstruct information on more than 22,000 victims over a decade, which will allow for the guidance of public policies without resorting to surveys that could re-victimize minors and their families.
“It is probably the most painful figure this Administration has produced, but also a figure for action,” he stated.
Regarding the economy, Urdinola stated that statistics show a recomposition of the productive apparatus, with greater dynamism in the agricultural sector compared to extractive activities, in addition to permanent changes in consumption patterns following the pandemic.
