Colombia has also made noticeable improvements in education. It has increased spending on education from 1.73 percent of GDP in 1980 to 4.5 percent of GDP in 2011. In 2011, it allocated an additional $513 million for the construction and reconstruction of approximately 200,000 schools. Today, primary school enrollment is at about 90 percent, and secondary school and college enrollment rates have risen.
In recent years, Mexico has strived to develop a robust economy while investing in social welfare policies. Government spending for health care increased from about 5.07 percent of GDP in 2000 to about 6.16 percent in 2011. In addition to providing health care services through the national Social Security Institute (mainly for employed workers), this spending has gone toward ensuring universal coverage through the Seguro Popular policy initiative of 2003, which guarantees access to health care for the uninsured. The country also allocated of $5.3 billion in the last few years, to build, expand, or refurbish more than 2,750 medical units. Meanwhile, access to essential medicines has increased: in 2002, only 55 percent of drug prescriptions issued by government-run outpatient clinics were completely filled, increasing to 79 percent in 2006.
The government has also continued to invest in education. As of 2010, its education spending was 6.2 percent of GDP, higher than Brazil (5.6 percent) and Russia (4.9 percent). There are still problems -- 75 percent of primary schools do not have computers or functioning libraries -- but the current administration has allocated an additional $900 million to fixing those problems. Today, Mexico also has one of the highest primary school enrollment rates in the world (99 percent of four-year-old children are enrolled in primary education), notwithstanding its struggles with high upper secondary school dropout rates.