During the next four years, the European Union will invest RD$5 billion (US$312 million) in projects to improve the living conditions in poor neighborhoods of Santo Domingo, improve health services, strengthen vocational-technical education programs, and modernize governmental operations. So said Max Puig, Dominican representative to the Lomé Convention, who noted that similar efforts over the previous four years had been funded with a RD$2 billion grant from the European Union. Puig was one of the featured speakers at a conference titled "Poverty and Social Marginality." From the same platform, Vice President Jaime David Fernandez Mirabal declared that "social organization is a necessary prerequisite" to any initiative taken to reduce poverty. He criticized the mentality that seeks "to do for poor people, but not with poor people." Chief of Police, Pedro de Jesus Candelier, another speaker at the conference, told the attendees that "poverty is the source of violence, delinquency and criminality."
