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Juan Avendaño is a small coffee producer on northern Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the world’s largest seaside mountain, and a pilot area for the Government of Colombia’s Family Forest Wardens program, which aids small farmers previously involved in illicit crop production to gain access to wider markets at home and abroad for legal products that they agree to grow.

Bibiana was only 12 when she was forced to join an armed guerrilla group that was passing through her small town in northern Colombia. She was taken away to a unit of 200 young men and women combatants based in the department of Antioquia.

Abandoned by her husband and almost entirely uneducated - she attended school for only one year - María Elisa Gil lives mostly on hope. With no employment options beyond her job sorting discarded paper and glass at a recycling center, she earns a sub-minimum wage salary of 10,000 pesos (US$4) a day. Gil says her boss wanted to promote her to an accounting job, but she lacked the schooling necessary to perform even elementary bookkeeping tasks.

BOGOTA, Colombia, December 12 – Thousands of Colombians braved a chilly evening this week to create a river of light in a central Bogota square in memory of the country's hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people and other victims of years of conflict.

MEDELLIN, Colombia – Every day after school, Johana Agudelo Norena, 11, climbs 300 steps from the road to her house at the top of Las Mirlas shantytown in Medellin. By now she is used to arriving tired and muddy, but the important thing for her is being able to study again.