For this course, I have decided to study the country of Colombia. Colombia is located on the northern tip of South America, bordering Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. It also has 3,208 km of coastlines along both the North Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. For comparative purposes, Colombia is about twice the size of the American state of Texas. In regards to the economy, Colombia most heavily depends on energy and mining exports, which means fluctuations in commodity prices makes the country especially vulnerable. In 2017, Colombia’s economy slowed significantly due to the fall of world market prices for oil. Over the last 10 years, however, the average real GDP averaged 4.7%, it was estimated to fall about 1.8% in 2017. The unemployment rate in recent times has been around about 9.3%. 

The majority of people that reside in Colombia speak the Spanish language and are Roman Catholic. The population is the 30th highest in the world. At about 48,000,000 according to a 2018 finding. As for the demographics of women, there are about 0.98 males for every female in the total population. A mother’s median age at first birth is 21.7 years, with about 64 deaths for every 100,000 live births. While the male life expectancy at birth is 73 years, that for females is 79.5. On average, a Colombian woman will birth an average of 1.98 children. One thing regarding women and their reproduction that I was surprised to find was that the contraceptive prevalence rate in Colombia (81%) is higher than that in the United States (75.9%). One unfortunate finding was that the unemployment rate for Colombian women was about 10% higher than that for men (male 14.7%, female 24.1%; ages 15-24).

Understanding the rate of progress is an important thing for any researcher to focus on when studying the well-being of a country. In the case of Colombia, the under-5 mortality rate has been considerably reduced over the past few decades, with about 97 in 1970 and only 18 in 2012. The total fertility rate has decreased since 1970, going from 5.6 children to 2.3 in 2012. One disappointing statistic for the country is that the GDP per capita average annual growth rate has slightly decreased in recent years (1.9% in 1970 and 1.7% in 2012).

After analyzing the disparity data reported by Unicef, I noticed that although there is a slight difference in the disparities between urban and rural populations, it is not substantial. I expected that those living in the urban areas would be slightly better off in most cases, which seems to be the case. Some statistics, such as primary school net attendance ratio, had almost identical statistics (91.1 urban, 91.2 rural). One larger disparity is the use of improved sanitation facilities in 2010, which was about 20% higher in urban areas than rural. Disparities by household wealth were slightly surprising to me, of which I again did not find striking differences. The ratio of skilled attendant at birth for richest to poorest residents was 1.2%, and the primary school net attendance ratio from 2008 to 2012 was 1. This means that even the poorest people are receiving a similar amount of education and maternal healthcare. When reflecting on this, I assume that the quality of these things for these differing demographics is likely substantial; I would expect that the richest 20% of children are receiving a better education than the poorest.