Venezuelan Government Aims to Register People in Extreme Poverty
The Venezuelan government announced that it will organise a national registration of people living in extreme poverty, and award small allowances to parents in extreme poverty with children.
Extreme poverty in Venezuela has decreased from 25% in 1998 to 7% currently.
Sports Minister Hector Rodriguez said the government will award Bs 300 ($US 66) per month per child under 15 to parents, but with a limit of three children, and Bs 600 ($US 132) for those children with disabilities.
“The idea is to help those families living in extreme poverty, whose incomes don’t even cover basic food requirements,” Rodriguez said.
He said the government was “constructing a methodology” to carry out the registration, but that it would likely be initially through education institutions then through promoter teams visiting communities and homes to verify the information.
Part of the plan also involves joining the disability mission, Jose Gregorio Hernandez with the giving birth mission, Baby Jesus, and the mission for poor single mothers, Mothers of the Neighbourhood, into one single mission. Rodriguez said the single larger mission would be aimed at “universalising social security and constructing a fairer and more equal society”.
He also said it was important that the families who receive benefits are integrated into the Knowledge and Work Mission, to be launched at the end of the year, so that the benefits “aren’t permanent but rather a stimulus which means that a family can eventually enter into a situation of productivity and satisfy their needs through their own efforts”.
President Hugo Chavez first publically proposed uniting the three missions and the child benefits yesterday at a ceremony to hand over loans to women in the Mothers of the Neighbourhood mission. The loans, payable off over five years, without interest, will go towards 460 social-productive projects carried out by 2,374 women.
Chavez said 1,345,021 children and teenagers live in homes in a situation of extreme poverty. “Those are life determining [stages of life],” he said.
The president explained that he had a “large team” working on the project and the registration process could hopefully start in December and payments in 2012. He suggested the children whose parents receive benefits could also have to attend school, receive regular medical check-ups, and their parents could form work committees.
This year the government has conducted a few other national registrations, including 3.7 million families who recently registered for the Great Housing Mission as needing homes or home repairs. Further, over 300,000 agricultural producers have registered with the Grand Mission Agro Venezuela and have already received some kind of assistance.
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Good reporting
By Rissler, Michael at Nov 18, 2011 16:57 PM
No great reform takes place seamlessly without problems, and no one needs to argue that Venezuela is "perfect." Nevertheless, I have visited there and was impressed with public activities that I saw on my visit--Barrio Adentro, education efforts, etc. It would be hard to exaggerate what these mean to millions of people in Venezuela and the contrast of those efforts with what in happening in the U.S. where today it was reported by the census bureau that 1 of 3 children live in poverty. This in the so-called richest country in the world where trillions can be redistributed by the government to the wealthiest.
I recently finished reading Steve Brouwer's book Revolutionary Doctors that details how the joint efforts of Venezuela and Cuba are changing "the world's conception of health care," as the book's cover says. Not only those countries, of course, but Cuba's longtime efforts to provide health care in many countries, including a rebuffed offer to help in Louisianna after Katrina, is not only something I have read about but have witnessed when my father-in-law had eye surgey without cost by Cuban doctors in Nicaragua. Incredible, and when I tell people in the U.S. about this, they are usually caught between confusion, disbelief, and wondering why not here in the U.S. where such surgery on a friend recently cost thousands of dollars, which she could ill afford, but it was a question of sight or blindness, dependency or having a life of individual responsibility and independence.
What this book describes, like the articles by Tamara, about what has taken place in Venezuela during the last decade is incredible in the best sense. It is a model.
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