By Maria Paula Lopez de los Rios y Raquel Trigo
By 2050, more than 28% of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean will be over 60 years old. This accelerated demographic shift presents an unprecedented challenge: how to ensure dignity, autonomy, and quality of life for millions of older adults across the region. Unlike other parts of the world, Latin America faces this transformation in a much shorter period and with more limited resources.
Currently, more than 16 billion hours are spent every day on unpaid care work worldwide, the equivalent of 2 billion people working full-time without pay. In the region, women take on between 68% and 80% of this workload, which limits their access to education, paid employment, and overall well-being. This reality underscores the urgency of developing a care ecosystem that not only improves the quality of life of older adults but also dignifies and professionalizes the work of caregivers, creating economic opportunities and promoting innovation, investment, and knowledge.
With this purpose in mind, Silver Region, an initiative led by BID Lab and the Arturo Sesana Foundation, successfully concluded its first call for proposals, marking a milestone in building an innovation ecosystem focused on aging and care in Latin America and the Caribbean. The program combines knowledge sharing, business strengthening, and financing through a grant scheme designed to catalyze scalable and sustainable solutions.
The call for proposals, open between September and November 2024, generated strong interest within the region’s social innovation ecosystem, with more than 1,800 organizations registered and hundreds of proposals submitted. Following a thorough evaluation and selection process, the three winning initiatives were recently announced, recognized for their impact, scalability, and innovation as part of the first edition of Silver Region.
The three winning innovations are:
HoraSalud (Chile)
Uses artificial intelligence to optimize appointment scheduling in public health services, enabling older adults to book and cancel appointments remotely, reducing waiting times, and improving access to medical care.
Mistatas (Chile)
Developed AMAIA, a tele-assistance system based on the Internet of Things (IoT) that detects and alerts about seven types of common emergencies, automatically connecting older adults with their support network in less than 20 seconds.
Glya (Colombia)
Provides continuous and accessible care for older adults with chronic illnesses by combining AI and IoT, without requiring mobile applications. The solution enables simple monitoring and personalized attention, fostering more human-centered and sustainable care.
The three winning organizations were selected after completing the acceleration and institutional strengthening process, through which they worked to scale their solutions and generate evidence of their impact. As the initiative continues to grow, its focus will expand to Central America and the Caribbean, with the goal of addressing the most pressing care needs in these regions.
This first group of winners marks the beginning of a sustained effort to build a regional innovation ecosystem around aging and care, one that emphasizes sustainability, scalability, and evidence generation to inform public policy and attract impact investment to the sector.
This first edition of Silver Region reinforces IDB Lab’s commitment to innovation for well-being and sustainable development. We invite you to continue exploring the opportunities of the silver economy and to join the conversation at GET Forum, where we will keep driving solutions that are transforming the future of care in Latin America and the Caribbean.