“Without their help, I wouldn’t be studying,” says Juan José Casado, a third-semester Medicine student at the University of Cartagena. After unsuccessfully trying to pass the Saber 11 exam, Casado followed, for months every afternoon on Facebook, the free classes that Joshue Castellanos (Bogotá, 29 years old) offers live on his platform Preicfes.App and his channel “Mentor Becario.” The second time he took the test, he not only passed it but was accepted into three public universities. Like him, more than 300,000 students have received Castellanos’ virtual classes since he started broadcasting them six years ago.
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Joshue Castellanos created this space so that young people from low-income backgrounds could strengthen the five core areas of the curriculum — mathematics, humanities, natural and social sciences, and ethics — and thus improve their scores on the ICFES tests. But his educational ecosystem goes beyond that: through the Alcanza una Beca Foundation, he manages agreements with universities and corporations that provide support for technical, technological, and professional careers. Since 2022, there have been more than 1,000 beneficiaries; just this year, 300 have been awarded, and they expect to close with 700 more.
All this work led him, in 2025, to be among the ten finalists for the Global Teacher Prize, considered the Nobel of Education. The recognition adds to the double international We Are Together award he received in Moscow in 2024 in the categories of equity of opportunities and social justice, and best project of the year. “We are going through a very good moment,” says the app creator.
This present was unthinkable in the years when life forced him to grow up suddenly. When Castellanos was 12 years old and in seventh grade, his mother had to undergo emergency surgery and was close to dying. The family lost their house, and he had to live for months at a friend’s house. Shortly after, while his mother was still recovering, his father died. Later, once recovered, his mother moved from Montería to Bogotá to work in domestic service and took his younger brother with her. Joshue stayed with an aunt while finishing school.
Then it all began. On weekends and during every vacation, he sold chocolates at traffic lights that his mother had taught him to make, “for 500, 800, or 1,000 pesos,” he says. Almost by accident, his reputation for being good at math sealed his fate: one afternoon, while training at a neighborhood gym, the owner asked him to tutor his daughter, who was about to fail the year. He offered to pay him for it.
The girl passed. “In December, the father called me drunk to thank me,” Castellanos recalls with laughter. One by one, other students came; he charged up to 30,000 pesos per month per student. On weekends, he continued selling chocolates and later, when the opportunity arose, worked as a magician at parties, bars, and nightclubs. To help with his university studies – as a Ser Pilo Paga scholarship holder, he studied International Business at Uninorte — he taught himself magic from a website.
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By 2019, with a published book (Supérate: la magia de un emprendedor (2017)) and years of motivational talks in rural schools, Castellanos visited a school near San Marcos, Sucre, called Caño Prieto: 20 students, a very small classroom, a single fan. “Teacher, we don’t have any of that here,” the students told him at the end of the talk. No tools, no money to pay. That day he understood that motivation alone is not enough in an area where, according to Uninorte figures, barely three out of ten young people manage to access university.
Months later, one afternoon in mid-2019, he proposed it to his cousin Joshua Cortés Castellanos in a place by the river, near the Asilo bridge, in Montería. He wanted to create a virtual training platform for Saber 11 but had no way to develop it. Cortés knew about systems. They started working, in the middle of the pandemic, with financial support from María Daniela Charry, who remains involved in the project. They launched Preicfes.App on October 10, 2020, and in the first two days, they reached 10,000 users.
Since then, the project has grown steadily, from free tutoring to scholarship agreements, which started with 40 in Sucre in 2022, without a budget, and were formalized from 2023 under the Foundation. Then came partnerships with departmental education secretariats and now, the creation of a virtual university that Castellanos hopes to launch in November. He also promoted a pilot program in India last year, suspended due to lack of funding, and plans to take the model to Chile and Spain.
That growth has not been free. In 2024, the year Castellanos describes as the hardest, he accumulated debts from previous projects, slept at an aunt’s house with barely two shirts and a pair of shoes, and continued paying the program’s teachers out of his own pocket while his family insisted he look for a formal job. That same year, he applied for the award in Russia for the second time and won. “Since then, things started to improve,” he says.
Castellanos still does not live off his project; he has a temporary contract in Bogotá while the sustainability model they are building takes off. He acknowledges that he has sacrificed emotional and economic stability: he has no children, has a long-distance girlfriend, and continues to allocate a good part of his income to paying old debts. Even so, when asked what he would say to the 12-year-old boy who sold chocolates at traffic lights, he does not hesitate: “I would tell him that things will get better, that they are not as bad as he thinks, that he is being prepared to build something great. That he should keep trying because he will be rewarded, even if he doesn’t understand it at the moment.”
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