The Minister of Commerce, Germán Umaña Mendoza, inaugurated María Fernanda Valdés Valencia as the new Vice Minister of Business Development on Tuesday. The official, as explained by the institution, will play a fundamental role in the government of the president Gustavo Petro because he will be in charge of promoting the productive development and reindustrialization of the country.
María Fernanda Valdés is an economist from the Icesi University of Cali, with a master’s degree in International Political Economy and Development from the Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and a doctorate in Economics from the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany.
She has worked as Project Coordinator at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Colombia, Fescol, a political organization of the German Social Democratic Party that supports learning and exchange processes with international experiences and gives visibility and recognition to peacebuilding efforts.
Valdés is also a professor at the Universidad de los Andes, has been a researcher at the Free University of Berlin and author of the book “Reducing Inequality in Latin America: The Role of Tax Policy”, published in 2016.
She recently led the process of merging the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism between the Government of Iván Duque and that of Gustavo Petro, which led her to get to know the ministry first-hand and make decisions about the programs that will continue in the new government.
“Today I arrive at the Vice Ministry of Business Development with several objectives: first, to promote the reindustrialization of the country, second, to advance in the substitution of an extractivist model to consolidate a productive and sustainable development model, and third, to strengthen MSMEs, traditional knowledge and the popular economyassured the new deputy minister.
To meet these objectives, he pointed out, it is necessary to promote programs to promote and consolidate companies, but also to build hand in hand with entrepreneurs.
“We want it to be through constant dialogue, not only with the country’s large, medium and micro-entrepreneurs, but also with the popular economy, which is different from what has been done for years. We understand that we must work together with businessmen, with the public sector and the private sector”, Valdes Valencia said.
He also announced that the universities and think tanks will become the knowledge base for decision-making by the Vice Ministry.
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