Colombia
Case management information system for the Mi Familia program in Colombia
Mi Familia is considered a central axis of the pact for equity. It was designed with
families at its center, considering their co-responsibility in the welfare of their
own members and in warranting the rights of children and teenagers.
Indirect registration
Case work
Children and their families
Information system description
A case management information system (CMIS) was developed to support the case management
program Mi Familia (“My Family”). Mi Familia is an accompaniment program that provides
tailored psychological support to promote children and teenagers’ development and mitigate
the risks of growing up in a violent, abusive, or negligent family environment. The
focus of the program is tailored psychological support, referrals to other services/programs
are complementary. The CMIS was developed as a tool to gather confidential information to
monitor and evaluate the progress in the implementation of the Mi Familia program.
Initial challenge
Colombia has a long-standing experience in case management for child protection, but not
in prevention. Before the introduction of the CMIS it took long for the central authorities
to get a sense of the implementation situation in the field and track the program. The
program implementers wanted to have timely information to track progress in the field and
shorten the time to analyse program effectiveness. But they were also interested in working
with less paper and having reliable data to be better able to provide on-time technical
assistance. Before the introduction of the CMIS, paperwork had to be collected in
regions and processed in the central administration.
Results
Using the CMIS, social workers can now record in-time information about all stages of
the case management process of Mi Familia which includes an assessment based on
psychometric tests, followed by the preparation of a tailored accompaniment plan that
includes psychological support and referrals to relevant program/services (when available),
home visits and group meetings and closing assessment to evaluate results. The number of
Mi Familia beneficiary families was about 190,000 families in 2021. It has been implemented
by 5,482 psychosocial professionals (field operators) in charge of home visits and group
meetings, and 746 experts that support the administration of the program.
INTAKE POINT:
Indirect registration
Registration normally takes place in municipalities. While the program is opened for
registration by demand, beneficiaries are normally pre-identified by Mi Familia
(this pre-identification is based on information from ICBF, ECD or other services or
registries in which potential Mi Familia beneficiaries are already participating).
Mi Familia is directed toward three types of families:
beneficiaries of programs of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare
(Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, ICBF) aiming at protecting
children from violence inside the family, or supporting children and
teenagers with past involvement in crimes
beneficiaries of public early childhood development (ECD) services
and social programs directed to children and teenagers
families with children with disability, registered in the National System
for Disability or identified as vulnerable by the Social Registry.
LEVEL OF CASE MANAGEMENT:
Case work
Mi Familia is an accompaniment program that provides tailored psychological support
to promote children and teenagers’ development and mitigate the risks of growing up
in a violent, abusive, or negligent family environment. It begins with an assessment
(based on psychometric tests), followed by the preparation of a tailored accompaniment
plan that includes psychological support and referrals to relevant program/services,
home visits and group meetings and ends with a closing assessment to evaluate results.
Referrals are a complementary service of the program, which mainly focuses on the
implementation of tailored psychological support.
POPULATION GROUP SERVED:
Children and their families
Mi Familia supports families with children and teenagers. The program’s beneficiaries
tend to be in the lower quintiles of income, but the program is not targeted at poor families.
CMIS EXISTING AND ACTIVE?
No
BENEFICIARIES COVERED BY THE PROGRAM:
(from the start of the program)
(from the start of the program)
190.000 families in 2021
