Catalina Escobar Restrepo

Catalina Escobar Restrepo is a Colombian international businesswoman and speaker dedicated to the social sector. She is the creator and President of the Juan Felipe Gómez Escobar Foundation, an organization that works to eradicate child mortality and supports teenaged mothers in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia). She is considered one of the most important leaders of Colombian society. she was the first Colombian to be nominated within the 10 finalists to the “Heroes CNN” award for the year 2012.
Catalina Escobar is an alumna of the Marymount of Bogota. She later graduated from Business Administration at Clark University (1993). Also, she studied in Europe and Japan (Kansai Gaidai University-Osaka) as well as a Master in Business Administration at INALDE. Before starting the foundation, she served for several years in the financial sector.
In 2000, she volunteered at a public maternity clinic in Cartagena. There she had to see a newborn child die because his mother did not have money to pay for medical treatment. This event, added to the accidental death of her son Juan Felipe, led her to decide to leave her company to dedicate herself to the social sector. That is how in 2001 she founded the Juan Felipe Gómez Escobar Foundation, with the idea of attacking infant mortality on the Colombian Caribbean coast, which had the highest rates in the country.
Since then, the Juan Felipe Gómez Escobar Foundation has carried out a successful work in the city of Cartagena, providing maternity rooms and building a social complex that attends daily to hundreds of children and teen mothers. According to figures from the Foundation, in the time it has been working, it has managed to reduce by 80 percent the deaths of children in Cartagena.Catalina Escobar has received different awards for her outstanding work in the social