Vice President Rafael Alburquerque announced his department is undertaking a socioeconomic study to quantify and find solutions to the social problems caused by the springing up of slum areas in booming tourism destination areas, as reported in Clave Digital, the online news agency. Speaking in Punta Cana at an event organized by Funglode, the think tank of President Leonel Fernandez, to present findings of the United Nations Human Development Report, the Vice President focused on the high mobility rates of people that migrate long distances to secure jobs in the tourism areas. A world recognized labor expert, Vice President Alburquerque highlighted that only 52% of the tourism labor force has even an elementary school level. He addressed the problems that the proliferation of of slum towns without any planning and without minimum services around tourism areas is creating. He said that to start to solve these problems one needs to first grasp the nature of the problem and quantify its magnitude, in order to identify the needs of the areas that may have been excluded from the Map of Poverty carried out by the government.
He said that the survey on tourism lodging carried out by the Central Bank reveals that the main obstacle to development of tourism is the low training level of the labor force, the lack of training centers, environmental problems and the high cost of electricity. He spoke of the new challenges from perspectives of inclusion and equity in the allotment of priority social spending with a focus on human capital. “We believe that one of the ways of turning tourism into an option for human development is through increased public spending in social areas,” he said. He stressed the importance of the language training in public schools in tourism areas and the need for increased technical and vocational training in tourist areas.