President Danilo Medina says that the people are at the center of Dominican government public policies. Medina wants a Dominican Republic that is a developed and prosperous country, where equal opportunity is not an ideal but an everyday reality.
Addressing the 69th General Assembly of the United Nations on Wednesday, 24 September 2014, President Medina said that a great national pact with education as the priority had been agreed on in order to achieve this goal. He recalled that in his administration the budget for public education has been doubled so that it is now at 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). He told the assembly that the greatest expansion of school infrastructure in our history has been achieved with the extra money for education. Medina also spoke of his pride in being able to announce that by the year’s end, thanks to the hard work of thousands of volunteers, he expected to declare the Dominican Republic “free of illiteracy”.
Medina spoke of progress in the area of health, including the elimination of charges at public hospitals. He said that each year around 450,000 affiliates have been added to the state subsidized health programs.
In parallel with this policy, Medina stated that his government is prioritizing support to small farmers. “We have been working for two years straight, visiting rural communities every week, listening to the community representatives and searching with them for solutions that range from supporting them with credit, to training and infrastructure,” he said.
The President told his audience that thanks to these and other measures, poverty in the Dominican Republic has been reduced by six percentage points in the last 18 months, that means that 568,061 people have been taken out of poverty.
In his address to the UN, Medina also issued a call to the international community to help Haiti document its citizens in its own territory as well as the Dominican Republic. He stressed that documentation was the first and indispensable step towards enjoying a complete package of rights.
The President stressed that one of the main actions that his government carries out in order to strengthen Dominican sovereignty and guarantee the rights of the people who live in the country, is to provide them with the documentation to which they are entitled. “As you well know, many of these people are Haitians. And in order to normalize their status in the territory of the Dominican Republic, they must first have identity documents from their country of origin, which many, unfortunately, do not,” he declared.
http://presidencia.gob.do/noticias/danilo-medina-estamos-construyendo-el-estado-de-bienestar-dominicano