FIRST GLOBAL FORUM ON HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
29-31 July 1999 . United Nations Headquarters . New York
LOCAL GOVERNMENT POLICY AND PROGRAMS
DR. Carlos Flores Alcocer,
FOUNDER and PRESIDENT OF THE HUMAN
DEVELOPMENT CENTER OF GUANAJUATO-MEXICO
PRESENTATION
In Guanajuato we decided to bet for the talent and the daily effort of our citizens to boost the development of the State.
Our struggle originates from the conviction that Mexico has to change in every order to be up with the demands of the population.
We have ideals and ideas, we feel like doing our job and doing it right; we have a clear course of action, we know where we want to go and what we must do to achieve our goal. We are striving to build the economy; transforming education; to accomplish our integral social development; to be a model for Mexico, communicating hope and demonstrating that new government alternatives do exist, creating necessary conditions for all the inhabitants of Guanajuato to have equal opportunities.
Our trust is born from the new citizen's attitude, more critical, decided and participant. It's born out of our inner force: material and natural resources, and out of our greatest wealth we posses, 4 million of guanajuatenses that with creativity and enterprising spirit forge a new path of development.
Our job and our proposal are framed in a philosophy, that considers the respect to the dignity of a person like the axle of our political and governmental task, away from the paternalistic schemes and promoting the conditions for Common wealth.
We believe in participative democracy like a government form and social conviviality, in the value of justice and based on that, in the preferential attention to the needy by providing them for opportunities of social development.
We have as a starting point of view, the Vision of Guanajuato we yearn, and has guided this government's work since the beginning.
The State Government and the society of Guanajuato, have as a mission to arrive at the third millennium, building a Land of Opportunities for all guanajuatenses, especially for the excluded from development, by confronting and exceed five great challenges and therefore contribute to Mexico's enlargement:
Create the conditions for an economic development, sustainable and competitive worldwide, that will impulse the progress of the guanajuatenses with out compromising the ecological balance.
- Economic Development.
To achieve a balanced social development, equal and participatory and sustainable, in which the quality of life is a priority and particularly the guanajuatenses health.
- Social Development.
To accomplish a Radical Educational Transformation in which human values,
- Educational Transformation.
knowledge and abilities, be a foundation of integral development of all guanajuatenses.To achieve to live permanently in an authentic law-abiding Administration which guaranties security, justice, social peace, participation and coexistence.
- Law Abiding State
To forge a Good Public Administration, competitive, honest, participant and proactive that will work better, cost less and generate greater benefits to society.
- Good Public Administration.
We must keep in mind that development is not spontaneous, it is not consequence of a natural process, it is a result of decisions. Thus the importance to establish participative planning process of development, that promotes social organization as foundation upon itself.
The central point of the government's work, is without doubt education, we know this will give individuals the possibility to generate and capitalize
the opportunities for their development, through promoting knowledge, abilities and values among guanajuatenses, necessary for their growth as persons.Around it, the economic development, social development, political development and the good government interact, attending different needs of a person to accomplish integral development.
For the actual government, one of its principal objectives is to achieve integral development for guanajuatenses. This implies the balanced and necessary attention of the diverse areas of a person to achieve their realization.
Economic development and social development must go together. Both are indispensable for integral development. Therefore Social Policy has various point in common with economic policy, giving as a result an including model that offers opportunities and fortifies the development of the State.
POVERTY IN GUANAJUATO.
Guanajuato, the whole country, has contrasting situations. In our state we live with conditions of a developed community, next to the realities of poverty and lack of opportunities.
The families with extreme poverty conditions are immerse in a situation in which
deficiencies feedback and reduce to the minimum the capacity to take advantage of available opportunities. This situation is transmitted, generation by generation, caused by nutritional, educational and health deficiencies that families are never able to overcome.Poverty is not only lack of income or insufficient resources.
We consider poor a person, family or group as one who lacks the necessary to survive and outdo by themselves; as one that lives in a marginal situation in one side and exploitation on the other; the extreme poor are the ones that experiment difficulty or incapacity to avail himself and satisfy their own and family needs.
The measurement of poverty is something complex and requires scientific procedures so it does not fall into subjective judgements.
The specialists on this topic have been using diverse methods, characterizing different aspects of poverty. To have an integral vision of poverty, one of the used methods, is the one that measures the Quality of life, which considers, in one side the satisfaction of basic needs and on the other, the minimum amount of income called the poverty line.
Combining both criteria, Julio Boltvinick came out with the Quality of Life Index, whose scale considers as a poor population those in which it is placed between 0.0 and 0.90; population with satisfied basic needs that one with an index between 0.91 and 1.10; and as non-poor population the one with a value that 1.11 of the established one.
We used this method to obtain a poverty map of the state, and that we present in a synthetic matter in the following figure:
Estratos Guanajuato Pobres No pobres Total Medio rural Pobres No pobres Total Medio urbano Pobres No pobres Total As you can see above, the north zone shows the lower quality of life indexes. However, what we call the industrial zone shows the greatest index, but with out even getting close to the necessary value to be considered as poverty free zone.
This geographical recognition, of poverty does not exclude the fact that every municipality presents very particular problems in the matter.Now, it's not enough to know that poverty exists, to measure its incidence and intensity. To elaborate an adequate strategy, it is necessary to know the causes that generate it.
Without pretending to be comprehensive enough, we consider that, in general terms, the causes of poverty are found in the application of certain economic models that have favored bad distribution of wealth and income, the precarious social capital, markets without social control, structures of oppression and dependency, the irrational management of natural resources and neo-liberal policies.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT.
The results that we have seen show us that, we have been working with models that, far from solving the problem, they have made it worse.
That is why, beyond schemes like paternalism or the free trade, that have failed in the intent to take apart poverty, today, in Guanajuato, we propose to work in coordinated way between civil society, the private sector and government, in order to build an including economic and social model.
Social development is centered in the person. That is why it should consider those elements which permit a person to find his social and individual realization. We refer to universal values like:
The Second Challenge of the Basic Government Plan has the objective to accomplish a balanced, equitable, participative and sustainable social development, which priority is the Quality of Life and particularly, the guanajuatenses health.
- The respect to the dignity of a person, like a foundation of the promotion of responsible, willfulness and autonomous growth of human beings.
- Solidarity, as an active social compromise with the less fortunate;
- Subsidiarity, as a way of helping others without limiting its growth;
- Justice to recognize and respect of each and every one what it corresponds to.
- Liberty as an essential element for convenience;
- Participation, as the result of everybody's effort to achieve common benefit and to be co-responsible agents for development.
- A continuos educational process, which allows a person in generating his own alternatives of development.
- Common wealth, as the last objective for development.
In Guanajuato we visualize social development as an educational, participative integral and inclusive process of continuos improvement of quality of life of the society as a group and as an individual, through establishing better basic conditions of life such as health, education, nutrition, shelter; and the human development of people, their dignity and spirit, within a free, fair, democratic, tolerant, jointly liable and subsidiary coexistence framework.
SOCIAL POLICY OF THE STATE OF GUANAJUATO.
The Social Policy of the State of Guanajuato seeks to extend the benefits of development for all the inhabitants of the entity.
From the whole population of the State, there is a not very large group, that historically had access to universal social services, that institutions (public or private) offer, thanks to the economic capacity to buy them or to be included in a particular social security system.
However, as you could appreciate in the poverty map, the great majority of the population does not enjoy those services with the desired regularity, they are left out of the opportunities to improve their quality of life.
The Social Policy seeks to revert those tendencies and to assure that Guanajuato's entire population, by diverse means, can have access to the basic social services. It comprises three strategic lines to do so.
The first strategic line pursues the increase of actions to broaden the coverage and quality of social services that are offered by institutions, public, private or communal.
This line of action contemplates an adequate coordination of work among those dependencies that integrate the Social Cabinet of the State Government.
The Government dependencies which compose this Cabinet have assumed concrete compromises with society, represented in their correspondent state programs of development, considered within the Basic Government Plan.
This strategic line also considers a narrow bonding with federal and municipal levels of government, as well as integration of the social initiatives, all this with the purpose for optimizing the available resources.It is important to consider that education is an essential part for social development, although, for its importance, it is regarded by this government as a priority, within the challenge of "Educational Transformation". In this sense, among the programs that have actually been undertaken, the following are highlighted:
1. Eradicate the physical backlog in basic needs, such as classrooms, sanitary services, latrines, workshops and managerial facilities.
- Special Program for Educational Spaces (SPES 2000), which objectives are:
2. To over come the outstrip in attention to the population without educational service.
3. To build the physical infrastructure required to deal with the demand by natural growth 1998-2000.
4. To consolidate the physical complementary infrastructure in each school, such as play grounds, civic patios, etc.The goal of this Program is to carry out the construction of 7,401 basic educational spaces, which require the educational system of Guanajuato, considering this way the outstrip from the year 1997, which represent a backlog of 4.979 spaces, and the natural growth for scholar cycles 1998-2000.
The results of this program, at july 1999, comprises the completion of 6,198 basic educational spaces, what means that there are only 1,203 basic educational spaces to be built by the year 2000.
The IPE, offers alphabetization, basic, middle and superior education, it also offers educational programs that favour human development, the constant training in and for labour and education for life. The above highlight the range of action of this organism and locates it in a privilege place to allow, in the future, to undertake actions more preventive than corrective in matter of education.
- Institute of Permanent Education (IPE), which comes out as an answer to the needs in the education for adults, and permanent education, meaning education for all and for the entire life. The IPE is a public decentralized organism of the State Government and was created by the Governmental decreed on October 13th, 1998.
This program was the first in the State of this magnitude, that compromises scholars with their original communities in the elaboration of projects that will take real and concrete solutions that they propose and are pursued by themselves. BK-MIL became not a paternalist program but into a gesture of new self-administrative conscience, prospective and joint liability. We can mention as an example of this that from the 4227 pupils that have benefit by this program today, 65% have elaborated project directed to create ecological conscience.
- BK-MIL Program. The Government of the State of Guanajuato has betted the present and future to education, creating in 1996 the BK-MIL program, which benefits youths of rural zones form the State of Guanajuato, to continue to study middle and superior education.
Since 1996 until today we have benefit a total of 4227 pupil, from those up to 1998, 3403 went to middle education and 824 to superior education.The second strategic line pretends, on one hand, to increase the investment for social development expanding the number of financial channels, on the other, it seeks to encourage the organized participation of society in the definition of these investments.
Through it we seek to increase the basic infrastructure for development (roads, electrification, water and sewer nets, urbanization, educational and sport installations, etc.) by means of actions that allow the prevision of basic services to a larger number of people, preferentially to the needier population.
We want to emphasize that the success of this strategic line is achieving that the investment is based on the decisions of the organized participation of society, so that it will be orientated to their needs.
From there, the importance of the work of the Planning Boards for Municipal Development, non-government entities which favours the participation of the citizens, next to the municipal government, for the planning of development.
In Guanajuato we have many results in that matter. The municipalities have seen a substantial increase of their investment funds for public constructions in the last years , from aprox. 61 million USD in 1995, to aprox. 185 million USD in 1999. The management of these funds has been decentralized in favour of the municipal administrations and are the citizens, through those Boards, who decide and prioritize the investment projects.
In this topic it is convenient to make a precision: this practice of social investment has given a new approach to public construction. Now that society participates in the definition of the application of resources, the projects have multiplied. They hundreds an hundreds of small constructions that solve social problems, not a few sumptuous or ineffective projects to the “proud” of the public administrators.
The actual state administration has noticed, with its actions, of its pro-municipal convictions. It has driven diverse actions which tend to strengthen the municipality as first government level, approaching resources, faculties and tools that allow to respond with much greater efficiency to the demands of their communities, respecting always their autonomy.
One of the Goverment of the State of Guanajuato tasks, has been to coordinate
the process of decentralization of services and/or functions of the state and/or federation to the municipalities, this is, the Municipalization of Guanajuato; for this it has promoted culture of participative planning as a mean to achieve integral development of the municipality and the impulse for the creation of some structures at the municipal level, such as the Social Development Directions (SODEDI) and the Planning Board for Municipal Development.Besides, we are compromised in improving conditions of life of all guanajuatenses and settle the bases of self-administration development, we compromise that all the rural communities with more than 100 inhabitants count on the basic services of water supplies, electrification an telephony, no longer than the year 2000.
The third strategic line seeks in generating opportunities of inclusion to development for the needier.
The public sector can not alone attend all these needs. The Social Policy considers key the involvement of the private sector and civil society to the programs and actions for social development.
This participation has two characteristics: 1) To be sustained in continuos educational programs that allow the individual to be the generator of his own opportunities; and 2) Favour organization and the participation of all groups of society in the generation of those mechanisms of inclusion.
In Guanajuato already exists clear examples of solidarity and subsidiary actions of the three key actors of society: Government dependencies, Non-governmental Organizations and from the private sector, which dedicate efforts and resources to the attention of vulnerable and excluded groups.
The Social Policy also seeks to be the integrator element of all of these actions, into a great force that will allow us to include everybody's participation in the opening of opportunities for social development.
This strategic line has as four objectives: to diminish indexes of poverty, reduce the inequalities among regions of the state, diminish the gap between rich and poor, and last but not less to improve the guanajuatenses' quality of life.
For this, it proposes three strategies:
1. To strengthen of human, financial and technical resources.
2. To fortify the institutional base.
3. To promote the participative integral development.Through the first strategy it seeks to multiply technical, human and financial resources, to generate mechanisms of inclusion, through establishing of structures that allow their optimal organization and results.
Within this first strategy it is imperative to highlight the creation of the human development centre; it is an organization integrated by the representatives of the public, social and private sectors, which has the mission to impulse research, evaluate policies and make proposals that pursue overcome poverty.
The Human Development Centre Board, which is comprised by representatives of the must important Universities, Research Centres, Government Agencies, NGO’s and an advisor of the United Nations Development Program, was formally constituted in April 1998. In January of 1999, the Centre organized “The Development with a Human Approach Forum”, with UNICEF and UNDP’s support, in the city of Guanajuato, with very remarkable results.
Within this strategy, the creation of two Communitary Foundations in the state was accomplished. The first one is located in the city of Irapuato, with an action field of 8 municipalities; the second, established in the city of Celaya, has an action field of 12 municipalities. These organisms respond to the involution of financial resources for social programs, developed by Non-Governmental Organizations and are managed by members of civil society.
Within the same strategy, the First Voluntary Action Centre was created by civil society. It was established at Dolores Hidalgo responding to the involution of human resources.
The second strategy pretends to establish the mechanisms that allow to fortify and professionalize public and private institutions, as the bonding of institutional programs focused to the inclusion of less favoured groups development.
This strategy considers support of render assistance for strengthening and professionalizing social organizations and to give a new focus dependencies of the public sector related to the social development, moving from paternalism to inclusion.
Within the second strategy, work has been done in training for professionalization of services of Non-governmental Organizations (NGO's).
As a result, during 1997 and 1998, 11 regional training workshops were offered to Non-governmental Organisms, in topics such as professionalization of services, communitary development, striving for funds and planning exercises; with the participation of 211 NGO's.By the other hand, and assisting in the mission of those organisms whose activity impinge on the social development of the state, through Non-governmental Organisms Support Fund, in 1997 and 1998, aprox 209,000 USD, were distributed, supporting diverse projects of social co-investment, in the topics of assistance to helpless childhood, assistance to physical and mental disability, human development and nutrition.
In the third strategy, there is the objective of establish the mechanisms that allow the orientation and optimize the labour of social promotion, as the operations of programs and projects of inclusion of government dependencies.
This strategy, emphasizes the program FIDEPO of the Found of the popular development, for the habitants of marginal rural zones, which proposes to impulse the integral development of needy people, by permanent processes of education in action and organization, with the popular education method.
FIDEPO attends 15 urban micro-regions, which are located in the municipality of Acambaro, Celaya (2), Guanajuato, Irapuato (2), León (4), Salamanca, San Francisco del Rincon, San Miguel de Allende, Silao and Valle de Santiago.
The labours that are actually carried out, emphasizes activities organized educated and impulse community projects as:
- Labour with youths to prevent addictions, sport impulse and agreements of convenience and social security.
- Cooperatives of consume and savings banks.
- Improving the environment, cleaning campaigns, reforestation in the neighbourhoods and waist recycling.
- Construction of centres and communitary life spaces.
- Dwelling improvement and the production of concrete blocks.
- Creation of a self-administration food bank, impulse to community kitchens and the production of whole grain bread.
- Support to the educational development for children, out side the classroom as a Homework Club for the following of school labour, substitution spaces in the absence of parents, prevention of drug dependency, health and nutrition.
- Elevate Educational levels in groups of children and youths that are school deserters.
- Training to elevate the nutritional quality and the production of preserves, needlework, and alternative medicine.
- Processes of communitary bonding to take advantage of municipal and state programs.
- Impulse self-esteem, communitary participation, organization and integral education of the person, family and community.
We talk about, in one hand, to give integral focus to the services that are presented to social nucleuses that demand them, on the other hand, it's about the consolidation of self-administrative social organization.Thus, favouring the organization and taking advantage of all the available resources and working on the professionalization of "social scaffolding" which ensure the social participation in the programs in a participative manner, we search that all guanajuatenses can enjoy the benefits of development.
The three mentioned strategic lines are integrated into what we call the 2000 Vision of Social Development. Its system contemplates as a foundation the conduction of development through the method of Strategic Administration Development, which considers the participative planning, the execution of actions and evaluation of these to verify their social impact.
With all this we search to create the proper conditions to impulse the Human Development of all guanajuatenses.
CONCLUSION
The problem of poverty in Guanajuato represents a great challenge, but there is no doubt that the capacity of organization and of solidarity response of the guanajuatenses is even greater, capable of surpassing this challenge.
In Guanajuato we are giving a sample that it is possible to fight poverty respecting the person in his more precious value: His Dignity. Ending with paternalist attitudes that denigrate the human being and makes it dependable.
We want to promote a developed included model, which is based on actions in a continuos educational process, so it would not impose solutions, but it will empower the individual to surpass his circumstances.
In this process, the authority does not decide how are they going to live; we do not generate opportunities that we think they are best for the guanajuatenses. As a government, we actually play the part of the supplier, advisor and supporter of that auto-development.
Social Politics is not a catalogue of good intentions. It is a method that is already operating and seeks to improve continuously.
We know that Guanajuato, in its different sectors, can canalize properly that great social energy and we are including everybody in the challenge of accomplish that the integral development will be patrimony of the guanajuatenses.In our hands has been the ability to surpass the distance that exists between dreams and the reality of social material matters. If we have been privileged of having a good quality of life, that privilege compromises with the less favoured guanajuatenses.
Thus, working together in the generating of new opportunities, so all of us can be able to develop, we are demonstrating that Guanajuato is, thanks everybody's effort, a land of opportunities.