Te invitamos a podcast en vivo con Terrenal.

Una conversación con Juan Camilo Cárdenas and Leopoldo Fergusson para entender por qué importa la desigualdad.

Conducen: Andrés Mejía y Andrés Caro.

 Date: jueves 18 de junio 
 Hora: 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. 
 Lugar: Edificio Mario Laserna, auditorio ML-C | Universidad de los Andes 

 El ingreso se dará hasta completar aforo.

Does inequality begin before we can decide about our own lives?

In the second episode of The game of life, TREES' videopodcast and the documentary film directed by Andrés Ruiz Zuluaga, we talk about motherhood, caregiving, teenage pregnancy and the inequalities that begin to mark life from early childhood.

Together with Raquel Bernal, rector of the Universidad de los Andes and an expert in early childhood, and Andrés Moya, director of Seeds of Attachment, Leopoldo Fergusson, co-director of TREES, and Andrés Ruiz Zuluaga reflect on the women who support entire families, the invisible burden of caregiving and how opportunities - or their absence - begin to shape the future from the earliest years of life.

From the stories of The game of life, This episode explores how social inequalities permeate motherhood and parenting: from teenage pregnancy and the absence of support networks, to the economic, emotional and cultural barriers that millions of women face in caring for and raising their children.

The conversation also addresses the role of the first years of life in children's development, how early experiences impact the future and why talking about early childhood is also talking about poverty, gender, violence and social mobility.

In this episode

• Why does inequality start from the earliest years of life?
• Maternity, care and poverty in Colombia
• Teenage pregnancy and inequality traps
• Women who support entire families
• What happens when parenting depends almost exclusively on mothers?
• Early childhood, violence and life opportunities
• How experiences from 0 to 6 years of age shape the future
• The stories behind the inequality data
• The invisible burden of care and gender gaps
• What would have to change in order to grow up in a more equitable country?

Watch or listen to the full episode

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Spreaker
• Amazon Music
• Deezer

📌 New episodes coming soon.

Inequality is not only reflected in income. It also appears in how we are valued, perceived and heard. In this masterclass, Leopoldo Fergusson, full professor at the School of Economics of the Universidad de los Andes and co-founder of TREES, argues that the most essential equality, the one that matters more than inequality of opportunities or outcomes, is that of being treated with equal consideration as members of a political community. Using everyday examples and research findings, he discusses the expressions of this type of inequality in Colombia, its historical and cultural roots, and the opportunities we have to overcome it.

The session is presented by Jhon Quinchua and was part of Pensar en Voz Alta, the Icesi University Festival, which brought together open conversations on the future of democracy, the inequalities that permeate society and the impact of artificial intelligence.

TREES (Teaching and Researching Equitable Economics from the South), an initiative of the Center for Studies on Economic Development (CEDE) at the Universidad de los Andes, funded by the Ford Foundation, and the EGAP (Evidence in Governance & Politics) Latin American Hub, are seeking advanced-stage research projects aiming to understand the causes and consequences of inequality, broadly defined. 

This call is open to researchers based in Latin America with advanced-stage research projects seeking peer feedback and support to finalize their work. The selected projects will receive up to USD 5.000 each.   

We are open to research contemplating non-economic aspects of inequality. We welcome empirical studies and contributions to the measurement, conceptualization, and historicization of inequality.  

Some non-comprehensive topics of reference may be:  

• Social segregation along income lines. 

• The economic and cultural implications of segregation.  

• Women in the economy of the global south. 

• Cultural, racial, and gender diversity. 

• Environmental justice.  

• Social interactions: Migration. 

• Stereotypes and discrimination. 

• Inequality and segregation in the labor market. 

• Teaching inequality from different areas of knowledge.  

• Fiscal issues and inequality. 

• Formal and informal rules, norms, and inequality. 

• Citizens and the State. 

• Teaching students with diverse characteristics. 

We encourage rigorous and intellectually ambitious research and welcome proposals from multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives, both domestically and internationally. 

Eligibility and Selection process

To be eligible for the grant, the lead applicant must be a Principal Investigator (PI) linked to a non-profit organization or institution legally established in any State of Latin America or the Caribbean (host institution). The host institution is willing to serve as the administering organization if the grant is awarded.  

If awarded the grant contract, the PI will become the coordinator. The coordinator is the sole interlocutor between the host institution and TREES.  

The lead PI may submit more than one Letter of Inquiry but may not be awarded more than one grant. 

The selection process consists of two stages

1. In the first stage, submitted applications will be reviewed and selected to participate in a peer-review workshop. 
2. In the second stage, selected participants will present their work during the peer-review workshop, where a selection committee will identify the best paper(s) based on the following criteria: academic rigor; feasibility, understood as the project's capacity to be realistically completed within the proposed timeframe and with the available financial support; and the contribution of the research to a broader understanding of the causes and consequences of inequality. 

Application Details 

Fill out the Letter of Inquiry form to express interest in the TREES Research Grant Fund. No later than June 24, 2026, at 11:59 PM Bogotá Time (UTC -5) 

Questions may be sent by e-mail no later than May 24, 2026, to the address below: 

trees@uniandes.edu.co 

Notes

• Due to the high volume of submissions, we regretfully cannot guarantee feedback on all the proposals received at any stage of the selection process. 

• To include all Latin America and the Caribbean, this call, the documents to be delivered, the deliverables, and the associated events will be in English. 

• Grants are awarded to the Host Institution with the explicit commitment that this institution offers appropriate conditions for the Principal Investigator and their team to direct the research and manage its funding for the project's duration. When the host institution commits to providing the appropriate conditions for the development of research and management of funds, it is expected that the administrative tasks or indirect costs will be a cost-share of the host institution. 

• The grant cannot be awarded directly to individuals.  

• Intellectual property shall remain with the PIs, but they grant dissemination rights to Uniandes and the Ford Foundation. 

• Any relevant changes to the proposal or team shall be submitted to trees@uniandes.edu.co and will be subject to approval. 

Evaluation Criteria and process

The selection committee comprises the three principal investigators of TREES. If the submitted topics warrant, external evaluators may be invited. At each stage of the selection process, proposals undergo independent evaluations by a minimum of two principal investigators. Following this initial assessment by at least two principal investigators, proposals are discussed by the selection committee at large, and those that garner greater consensus are funded (fully or partially). 

Evaluation Criteria for the Research Proposal:

• Clarity and Relevance of the Research Problem.  

• Problem Statement: The proposal must clearly articulate the research problem, ensuring it is directly connected to issues of inequality. 

• Question, Objectives, and Justification: The proposal should specify the research question, outline the objectives, and justify the significance of the research clearly and concisely. 

• Contribution's Relevance and Novelty: The proposal must highlight how the research contributes new insights or approaches to the field, emphasizing both relevance and innovation. 

• Methodological Design. 

• Appropriateness of Methodology: The proposal should demonstrate that the chosen methodology is suitable and robust enough to address the research problem effectively. 

• Feasibility and Resources. 

• Realistic Proposal: The proposal must assess its feasibility, considering the resources available and the time frame. 

• Availability of Data and Resources: It should confirm that data and essential resources can be acquired within the proposed budget and time constraints. 

• Clarity in Writing. 

• Writing Quality: The proposal must be written with clarity, making it accessible and understandable to reviewers, without sacrificing depth or complexity. 

Application Deadlines 

What really determines the opportunities we have in life? How do the place where we are born, the relationships we build, and the barriers—both visible and invisible—influence our life paths?

From the film The game of life*, we are launching a new video podcast that sparks conversations about inequality, social mobility, early childhood, classism, education, privilege, and territorial issues in Colombia.

In each episode, Leopoldo Fergusson—professor of economics and co-director of TREES— and Andrés Ruiz—Director of Communications at Uniandes and director of the film—talk with researchers, teachers, artists, and individuals with diverse life experiences to explore how inequalities permeate daily life and shape people’s opportunities.

The podcast takes as its point of departure the real stories portrayed in the documentary film The game of life, a film made over the course of more than 14 years that follows the lives of Colombian families in different parts of the country. Drawing on these stories, the conversations bring together personal experiences, research, and film to reflect on the many dimensions of inequality.

The videopodcast of The game of life seeks to create a space to think about the country from different perspectives and open conversations that often remain outside the public debate.

*The film is based on the research of the Colombian Longitudinal Survey (ELCA) of the School of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes. The ELCA followed 10,000 families for more than a decade to better understand the dynamics of poverty and inequality in Colombia.

🎧 Watch or listen The game of life videopodcast on all platforms:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Spreaker
• Amazon Music
• Deezer

Check out the first six episodes:

A production by El juego de la vida and TREES, an initiative of the Universidad de los Andes that conducts research, teaches, and raises awareness to influence public discourse on inequality. 

📌 New episodes every week.

The meeting brought together academics and international experts in sessions on extractivism, inequality, informality, global fragmentation and international trade, as well as in discussions on new forms of cooperation in the face of the challenges of ecological transition and sustainable development. 

These sessions sought to answer a fundamental question that, as Jimena Hurtado, Vice Rector for Research and Creation at the Universidad de los Andes and co-founder of TREES, put it: “How can we understand an economy that does not work for everyone in countries where inequality is not a figure but a daily reality?. 

From this perspective, the conference also sought to generate exchanges between countries of the global south that share histories of violence and the search for ways to transform them, with a potential that goes beyond academic dialogue. In Hurtado's words, this type of space allows the construction of collaborations that connect knowledge with concrete historical, institutional and social processes. 

The keynote address was given by Julieta Lemaitre, magistrate of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), whose career embodies precisely this crossover between academia and institutions. Her intervention addressed the relationship between citizenship and state, the ways in which communities build solutions in contexts of state absence and the role of justice in post-conflict scenarios, showing how institutions can both reproduce and transform inequalities. 

Below is an illustrated publication summarizing ‘Rebuilding’, Lemaitre's keynote lecture.:

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Thus, PEGS is conceived as a broader process of dialogue among countries of the global South, recognizing both their differences and the existence of shared structural challenges, including inequalities. It does so by articulating the work of centers or initiatives such as TREES in Colombia, the Center for Critical Imagination (Cebrap) in Brazil, the Applied Economics Program of El Colegio de México, Pathways Beyond Neoliberalism in the American University in Egypt, and the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at Wits University in South Africa, which collaborate within the Emerging Political Economies (EPE) Network.  

As part of this effort to articulate a network of countries that share similar realities, the conference also reflects a commitment to amplify knowledge of these contexts. In Hurtado's words, the aim is to build agendas that are not “recipients of frameworks developed in other contexts, but interlocutors with their own voice and questions”. 

In the same vein, several of the panels highlighted the need to review the frameworks from which the problems of the global south are understood. “It is important to have a global south perspective for a global economy. Sometimes we think from a perspective that doesn't resonate with the way people in these countries live,” said Pierre Nguimkeu, professor of economics at Georgia State University and director of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution. 

An example of this type of discussion was the session on inequality, led by Leopoldo Fergusson, professor at the School of Economics of the Universidad de los Andes and co-founder of TREES, with the participation of Rodrigo Uprimny, senior researcher at Dejusticia and professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Raymundo Campos and Aurora Ramírez Álvarez, professors at El Colegio de México.  

There, different dimensions of the structural gaps in the region and the challenges to address them from interdisciplinary approaches were discussed. As Uprimny pointed out, there is a disconnect between the field of human rights and the analysis of inequality: while normative frameworks have made progress in addressing discrimination between groups, “when one enters the field of social and economic inequality, the human rights movement is, in a certain sense, silent”. Along these lines, he stressed the need to connect rights more directly with the dynamics of inequality, not only as a theoretical problem, but also as a practical one. 

In this regard, Fergusson stressed that inequality is not limited to income differences, but produces deeper forms of social separation: “people with different income levels live so far apart that they end up being culturally distinct, as if they were different groups”. In this sense, he stressed that one of the central challenges is to think about these gaps not only in terms of distribution, but also in terms of rights and what it means to have an equal position in society, particularly in contexts such as those of Latin America. 

Labor informality was another of the central themes of the meeting. Laura Alfers, WIEGO's international coordinator, raised the discussion aligned with the idea that the frameworks do not coincide with the realities of the countries of the South: “60% of workers are in informal employment, something that could increase with technological change. Our labor institutions are still oriented around an idea imported from countries in the global north, developed in the 1940s and 1950s for labor markets that do not exist in the south.” 

In addition to the academic sessions, the conference included a research workshop, a teaching session and strategic spaces for articulation between centers in the global south that are part of the Emerging Political Economies Network, These meetings helped to consolidate a south-south network to promote those voices and questions of their own. These meetings contributed to consolidate a south-south network to promote these voices and questions.  

Throughout the event, the persistence of overlapping and mutually reinforcing structural gaps was highlighted, many of which go unnoticed because we tend to always look in the same places. In this context, the conference highlighted the need to broaden the analytical approach. In Hurtado's words: “to broaden our gaze, to look where we usually do not look and to accept that absence in the record [evidence or data] does not mean absence in reality”. 

See the video summary of the event.

Transforming reality requires changing the ideas that sustain it.

Therefore, in TREES we work to understand and transform inequalities based on rigorous knowledge. In this report we share what we have done between 2023 and 2025 in our three areas of work: Research, Teaching and Outreach. Here you will find our main achievements, learnings and challenges.

To view the report, click the button.

More than an academic exercise, the challenge opened a space to connect research, critical and ethical thinking and collective work. Rather than viewing communities as objects of study, the participatory research methodology promoted processes of dialogue and co-creation in which the people involved were able to reflect on classist attitudes and how they reproduce inequalities.

For Irma Flores, associate professor at the Faculty of Education of the Universidad de los Andes, one of the main contributions of this approach is that it allows “not only to bring a topic such as classism to a community, but also to talk to that community to see what they understand by classism”. From this perspective, participatory research not only produces knowledge: it also strengthens the social fabric and creates more horizontal relationships between researchers and communities.

Watch the reel and find out why participatory research was key to #RetoTREES

The challenge was aimed especially at students in training, precisely because this academic moment can open spaces for critical exploration and interdisciplinary creativity. As Paula Jaramillo, TREES teaching leader, points out, it is “a moment in life in which they can perceive the classisms around them and try not to reproduce them and also do something about them”.

The challenge was developed in six phases that guided the teams in the design and implementation of participatory action research in their own environments. Throughout the process, students identified and critically analyzed attitudes, relationships, perceptions and practices that reproduce - or challenge - dynamics of classism in everyday life. For the two editions of the Challenge, 2024 and 2025, the last phase culminated in a face-to-face meeting at the Universidad de los Andes, where the teams shared their findings, discussed their methodologies and reflected collectively.

Beyond presenting results, the final meeting allowed students to connect practical experience with theoretical, methodological and ethical discussions on how to do research with communities. As stated by Blas Zubiría Mutis, mentor of the Universidad del Atántico, during the 2024 meeting, the process allowed participants to “live a concrete research experience, using parameters established by TREES and linking them to the theoretical, methodological and epistemological reflection of participatory research”. In the first edition of the Challenge, teams from Universidad del Norte, Universidad del Atlántico, El Colegio de México and Universidad de los Andes developed research questions, designed methodologies and evaluated together with the communities whether this type of research was meaningful and useful for those who participated in it.

The projects developed during the challenge also showed how classism manifests itself in everyday scenarios. One of the teams from the Universidad del Atlántico investigated dynamics of classism and microclassism in Alameda del Río, an urban housing project that brings together people from different socioeconomic contexts. Through observation, interviews and surveys, the team identified how everyday practices - such as drying clothes in windows or the presence of street vendors - generate tensions related to social status and perceptions of exclusivity.

The research showed how certain prejudices, towards informal activities and ways of inhabiting the space, reflect stereotypes and class barriers that generate tensions in coexistence. Beyond identifying these dynamics, the process allowed us to open conversations with the community about the ways in which these practices affect relations between neighbors and the perception of the “other” within the same territory. “Through surveys and interviews, we collected perceptions of exclusivity and prejudice towards informal activities such as street vending. These results will allow us to propose mitigation measures and foster understanding of classist attitudes,” explained Andrés Eduardo Miranda Pacheco, challenge participant and member of the #SOMOSUA team.

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The Alameda del Río project showed how the challenge not only sought to produce data on classism, but also to generate processes of listening and collective reflection. This same logic ran through other projects of the TREES 2024 Challenge, such as the one developed by the SINPREJUICIOS team, which investigated the dynamics of classism in a beauty salon in Bogota. Through interviews and observation, the team identified how class differences between employees and clients produce derogatory attitudes towards workers.

“We discovered that personal attention, talking to the client, is considered an ‘implicit service’ that affects less talkative employees. We also found xenophobia and gender preferences among the stylists,” explained María Fernanda Blanco, a participant in the SINPREJUICIOS team. For the members of the project, one of the main lessons learned from the challenge was to understand the importance of humanizing people in the research and not seeing them only as data.

In addition, the Challenge served as a space for building networks among students from multiple regions and socioeconomic contexts, strengthening ties and collective learning. Valentina Gutiérrez, a student at Universidad de la Sabana, talks about what it meant to her to participate in the TREES 2025 Challenge.

“In this experience I understood the importance of each discipline, because each one brings a different look that enriches and transforms the way we understand reality. The most important teaching is that we must constantly challenge ourselves and question what attitudes or behaviors may be replicating classism, even when we are not fully aware of it.”

This reflection was also echoed in the experience of Verónica Rumaña Moreno, a student at the Universidad de los Andes and member of the team. Sentipensante Fabric. For her, one of the main lessons learned was to understand that classism does not always manifest itself in an obvious way. “Discriminatory behaviors are not necessarily expressed explicitly; many times they appear in subtle actions that have a profound impact on people,” she said.

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The teams' findings also revealed a major challenge: classism is often deeply normalized in everyday interactions, which makes it difficult to identify, investigate and even name. This is why the participatory research methodology takes on greater importance in the TREES Challenge, as it allows for the opening of spaces for listening and dialogue, and for the communities themselves to name and identify classism in their environments.

For more than five months, students not only develop research on different expressions of classism in their immediate environments, but also explore concrete ways to recognize and mitigate these attitudes that create inequality gaps in everyday life.

Watch here the TREES 2024 CHALLENGE coverage reel