María Isabel Castro remembers the moment Red Cross rescuers pulled her and her family from the rubble of their home in Pereira, Colombia, on August 10. A devastating 7.4-magnitude earthquake had struck the city of roughly 472,000 people, nearly 53% of whom are women. More than 100 people were killed in Pereira alone, according to the National Institute of Legal Medicine.
The earthquake, centered near the rural town of San José del Palmar in Chocó, left widespread destruction across the country. In Pereira, at least 92 buildings collapsed, and 60 educational facilities were damaged. Nationwide, the earthquake killed more than 300 people, left hundreds missing and injured more than 4,000 others.
Among them was María Isabel’s husband, Álvaro García, a lawyer who spent much of his career representing clients pro bono. He lost both legs when the family’s home collapsed and spent nearly two months in the hospital before dying from an infection following his amputations.
“My daughter and I are completely lost,” María Isabel told More to Her Story. “It was just the three of us.”
Álvaro left behind María Isabel and their 17-year-old daughter, Valentina. Victims like him, who died from their injuries weeks after the earthquake, have yet to be accounted for in official death tolls.
María Isabel, who spent weeks in intensive care, ran a small business producing herbal infusions. “We lost everything. Absolutely everything — the plants, everything I had, the production. It was all buried there,” she said. “So, I'm empty-handed again.”
She also broke her right hand, which surgeons fixed with a metal plate. “With that hand, I barely have any strength,” she said.
Without the use of her hand, María Isabel can’t work, and without work, she has no money coming in. She and her daughter now live with a friend in the Belmonte neighborhood of Pereira. “We don’t have a single peso. We’re staying in someone else’s home. Ordinary people have helped us with groceries and clothes. But help from the government, nothing. They haven’t given us anything.”
Three months after the earthquake, Colombia is expected to shift from emergency relief to reconstruction on November 10. Officials in Pereira estimate that rebuilding the city will cost 13.8 trillion Colombian pesos ($3.8 billion). For many Colombian families, rebuilding after the earthquake will depend on women already struggling to keep their households afloat. Nearly half of all households in Colombia—46.4% in 2025—are headed by women, according to the national statistics agency, DANE.
Those households were already poorer before the ground shook. In 2025, 32.3% of female-headed households lived in monetary poverty, compared with 24.5% of those headed by men, and 11.7% lived in extreme poverty against 8% of male-led homes, according to DANE. In rural areas, the poverty rate for households led by women reached 45.1%. Some 4.7 million of these women are single mothers, and the livelihoods of 12.7 million Colombians depend on them.
Women also do most of the unpaid work that keeps these homes running. Colombian women spend an average of 7 hours and 35 minutes a day on unpaid domestic and care work, more than twice the 3 hours and 12 minutes men spend, per DANE’s latest time-use survey. Only 34.4% of women take part in paid work, compared with 55.6% of men. In these homes, the mother is often the only one earning, the only one caring for the children, and the only adult who deals with schools, clinics, and government offices.
A disaster that destroys the house or the business—which are oftentimes the same place for 57.1% of Colombia’s labor force that works informally—wipes out the family’s only income, and an injury like María Isabel’s takes away both the earner and the carer. “My husband didn’t leave us a pension, he didn’t leave us a house, he didn’t leave us absolutely anything. He never thought he was going to die!” she said. “It was something inexplicable.”
The national government offers three months of rental assistance to families whose homes were destroyed or left uninhabitable. In Pereira, the monthly payment is 1,050,543 Colombian pesos ($331.66). To qualify, households must be listed in the national registry of disaster victims, have their homes certified as destroyed or uninhabitable, and pass a verification process. In mid-September, Pereira’s mayor’s office said payments would only arrive once those administrative stages were complete, and gave no dates.
“Three months already, and not even the first subsidy to pay rent. They haven’t given us anything,” María Isabel said.
The response has looked different from one region to the next. Chocó has some of the highest rates of female-headed households in Colombia, and some of the most neglected public services.
Rafael Bolaños, the mayor of Quibdó, Chocó’s capital, was in Cali with his wife on August 10 for the inauguration of President Abelardo de la Espriella. Their only daughter, Salomé, was home alone. After part of Cali’s airport collapsed and flights were cancelled, Bolaños reached her by phone and asked her to check the house’s columns for cracks. The house was still standing, she told him, but fallen objects littered the floors. He returned that afternoon on an air force flight.
“There are structures at risk of collapse that need to be demolished,” he said. “Right now we don’t have the capacity to carry out all the demolitions the city needs, because we don’t have enough machinery, because we don’t have enough qualified personnel.”
Hillsides cracked by the quake are putting homes at risk, and streams have filled with rubble. “Some people have dumped demolition material in the first place they find — that is, in the water sources,” he said. “All of this, added to the heavy rains of recent weeks, worsens the risk conditions.”
The earthquake struck a city already getting poorer. In 2025, Quibdó was the only Colombian city where monetary poverty increased, reaching 61.7%, while extreme poverty rose to 32.5%. Before August 10, only about 55% of Quibdó had piped water and 17% had sewerage. “The water isn’t continuous. It comes by the hour, on schedules. That has to change.”
More than 3,000 families in Quibdó have begun receiving government assistance to cover temporary housing costs, Bolaños said. He called it “a temporary solution, until the definitive, structural solution can come.” The city has turned a sports venue into a shelter, and the municipality has set aside 24 hectares of land for resettlement. “Oftentimes, the state is slow in these processes,” the mayor explained. “What people are asking for is a response.”
Ana Mejía, a single mother of seven in Quibdó, can’t take a job. She cares full-time for her daughter, Kelly Johana, who uses a wheelchair, and for her 14-year-old son, who has a brain cyst. “I’m a single mother. I can’t work because my daughter has a disability,” she told me. “My children are orphans.”
When the earthquake struck, Kelly Johana was inside the house. “She can’t walk, so we had to get her out by dragging her,” Ana said. Two of Ana’s younger children were at school. “I ran like a madwoman to the school. I fainted when I got there,” she said. After collecting them, she ran to another school to find her third son, but he was nowhere to be found. “I kept saying he’d been buried in the classroom.” He had made his own way home.
Kelly Johana couldn’t walk after the earthquake. “We had to take her to the bathroom, do everything for her,” Ana said. Three months on, her daughter can get up and sit in a chair again, though the family house is “about to collapse.”
Ana sold their small home and plans to leave Chocó for Zaragoza, where her mother and sister live. Until then, the family gets by on what the older children bring in; two of Ana’s sons work, one of them as a handyman, and one of her daughter’s partners picks up casual work when he can find it. “That’s how we keep going,” she said.
According to the UN’s humanitarian office, the quake affected more than 400,000 people across 15 regions. Weeks after August 10, hundreds of people in Quibdó were still sleeping in shelters and makeshift housing that lacked water, showers and toilets. Families like Ana’s, who relocate on their own to stay with relatives in other parts of the country, often go uncounted in official shelter figures.
But staying put carries its own risks for women and girls. In August, the UN Population Fund warned that those sleeping outdoors or in makeshift shelters in Chocó faced a heightened risk of sexual violence. Families who lost their livelihoods may also be forced to rely on others for food, water and protection, leaving women and girls more vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
In Quibdó, women organized shifts to watch over one another and their children. “We’re afraid of experiencing sexual violence, but we’re organizing,” one community leader told UN News.
Asked about the women of Quibdó, Mayor Bolaños didn’t hesitate. “They have been berracas,” he said, using the Colombian slang term for someone tough and determined. Women are the ones who come to the mayor’s office most often, “asking how to do things, who to talk to.”
“They have post-traumatic stress, which I think all of us who were affected have,” he said. “They need special support and accompaniment, psychosocial support.”
That help has not reached María Isabel’s family. “We haven’t even found a psychologist to help us with what she’s going through, and with what I’m going through, too. We both need it,” she said of her daughter Valentina. “We’re completely alone.”
Valentina is due to graduate from high school on November 27. She hopes to study law, following in her father’s footsteps.
“Sometimes she doesn’t get up. She cries all day, holding a picture of her dad,” her mother said.