Muévete Bogotá: promoting physical activity with a network of partner companies

In 1998 the mayor's office and the District Institute for Sports and Recreation created Muevete Bogota, a physical activity and health promotion programme for the capital city of Colombia. Muevete means to move or to be active, and this campaign to promote physical activity was designed to improve the health and quality of life of the citizens of Bogota through regular physical activity. The programme is based on the 1995 recommendations on physical activity of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Sports Medicine (Pate el al., 1995), and was developed in close consultation with the Agita Sao Paulo programme in Brazil (Matsudo el al., 2003). Muevete Bogota couples a mass media campaign with programmes targeted to change physical activity behaviour. The interventions, which are conducted at work sites, schools, health care centers and in community settings rely on partnerships created among professionals in areas of education and health, business officials and personnel, and community members, to deliver the programmes in each of these settings and populations.

Like many developing countries, Colombia suffers from a growing epidemic of chronic diseases. In 1993 35.7% of total mortality in the city of Bogota was due to chronic diseases (Espinosa, 1993). In 2002 cardiovascular diseases accounted for 40.3% of mortality among the population aged 60 years or older and 26.8% for persons 45 to 59 years of age. (Cardona, 2002)

Bogota has implemented extensive physical and social environmental changes over the last decade, which has increased opportunities for physical activity, but sedentary lifestyle continues to be a significant public health problem in the city. Programmes such as Muevete Bogota that educate and motivate the population to become more physically active appear to be needed to complement the underlying environmental and policy changes. Muevete Bogota provides an example of successful implementation of a comprehensive multi-sectoral approach to physical activity promotion in a large metropolitan area. This model may be used as an exemplary effort elsewhere in Latin America and in urban areas in developing countries around the world.