Teams from Colombia and Honduras took top honours at this year’s Superheroes of Development 2024 contest organized by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In its seventh iteration, the contest received a record 149 entries from 26 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Superheroes of Development showcases key lessons and innovative solutions from development projects for other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to replicate. It is an initiative of BIDAcademy, the IDB’s platform for sharing rigorous and practical knowledge for improving lives in the region.

Lorena Rodríguez Bu, head of the IDB’s Knowledge and Learning Division, said: “Knowledge is central to development because it enables us to design solutions, drive progress and achieve a sustainable impact. Superheroes of Development aims to honour executing agencies and clients that have successfully overcome challenges in carrying out projects financed by the IDB, as well as to systematize and share the knowledge they gained to make development more effective.”

The winners of the seventh contest, which were selected from among five finalists, are:

Social and economic entrepreneurship for fighting deforestation (Colombia). Executing agency: ACDI/VOCA. This project was designed to stop deforestation and keep the agricultural frontier from advancing. It focused primarily on Colombia’s Paramillo and Catatumbo Barí national parks, where illegal economies have a strong foothold. Through this initiative’s conservation efforts, 487 families who live in these parks have become key players in a much more sustainable rural development model that combines production with environmental conservation efforts.

The project’s executing agency launched “DecidoSer,” a methodological tool that promotes participatory knowledge-building—based on local insights—and fosters spaces for community reflection. The tool encourages people to see themselves as agents of change, or as stakeholders responsible for their territory and development.

Program to accelerate learning through tutoring in vulnerable Honduran communities (Honduras). Executing agency: Strategic Projects Unit of Red Solidaria. The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on education in Honduras: over 600,000 students dropped out of school in 2020. Those who stayed had to navigate the difficulties of adapting to new distance-learning methods, causing major setbacks. In response, Red Solidaria and the Ministry of Education launched a program to accelerate learning among children in rural communities whose academic performance had fallen short of the standards for their age.

In practice, remote learning was complicated because many rural families had no internet access or computers. To overcome this obstacle, the executing agency developed a hybrid model: mobile classrooms that travelled to small groups of students—in their homes or on the coffee plantations where their families worked—and over-the-phone lessons with follow-up text messages.

The panel that selected the winners consisted of Jordan Schwartz, Executive Vice President of the IDB; Ana María Ibáñez, IDB Vice President for Sectors and Knowledge; Anabel González, IDB Vice President for Countries; James Scriven, General Manager of IDB Invest; Irene Arias Hofman, CEO of IDB Lab; and Alexandre Meira da Rosa, General Manager of the IDB’s Office of Strategic Planning and Development Effectiveness.