2011 brings many challenges in all areas. Reflecting upon the challenges and opportunities of university cooperation in the context of the current worldwide systemic crisis is perhaps one of our primary tasks as academics and as citizens of our respective countries. This reflection in turn leads us to one of the challenges facing educational systems in developing countries: improving fairness in access to quality education. In the Colombian case, the Ministry of Education has proposed seven elements for improvement: 1) Reducing gaps in education among zones and vulnerable groups; 2) Improving the quality of education at all levels by incorporating innovation and new technologies; 3) Guaranteeing funding to enlarge coverage of public universities with efficiency and quality while also lowering dropout rates; 4) Consolidating the national vocational training system; 5) Education with relevance for innovation and productivity; 6) Having the necessary funding to continue enlarging coverage and improving quality; and 7) Improving the Ministry's management model in the higher education sector.

All of these elements are very important aspects for improving education in a developing country, but they leave out the integrating element of inter-institutional cooperation as the basis for exploiting the resources available to educational systems. The impulse that higher education must give to primary and secondary education, starting from a substantial improvement in teaching quality, is fundamental in order to achieve fairness in access to education in any country in the world.

At the same time, we cannot speak of physical infrastructure without addressing the logical infrastructure of education. In other words, we cannot simply think about creating institutions with better physical infrastructure and forget about teacher training. Proof of this is that institutions with the best physical infrastructure do not necessarily obtain the best results in evaluation processes. What is relevant is to generate improvement plans with the agents who intervene in the educational system while emphasizing openness towards new training strategies to improve flexibility and coverage, taking into account the particular characteristics of each region.

However, the biggest challenge does not directly concern education but rather involves overall social change. The question is, how can we achieve improvements in our educational systems if we do not focus efforts on protecting one of the basic pillars of society? I refer to the family, because, even though it constitutes the basic support mechanism for the education of each boy or girl, the logic of our societies, above all in families belonging to the less advantaged socioeconomic groups, means that parents must hold more than one job to be able to economically support their children. This leads to a notable reduction in the amount of time they can spend with them. In the best of cases, these children are cared for by their grandparents or other family members, but in other cases they face situations of risk involving little supervision by responsible adults. This in turn generates difficult social phenomena such as contact with people who induce bad habits or entice them into "recruitment" by criminal groups or gangs.

That means that the challenges are not easy to deal with, but it is nonetheless necessary to identify this problem in order to understand that policies for improvement that are overly focused on the educational system are useless as long as the intimate nucleus of the students is permeated by complex family situations that end up being decisive in their formative process.

That is where the social responsibility of companies must come into play, something that is frequently spoken of but whose real effect on society, in most cases, does not go beyond informational campaigns.

Edison Jair Duque Oliva

Editor in chief

Fulltime professor Universidad Nacional de Colombia