WILLEMSTAD - The new board of the political party MAN has started a cycle of lectures for the members. Last Saturday on Augustus 20th was kicked off by Sharnon Isenia, an expert in the field of cooperatives. As a professional planner and geographer, he made the connection between neighborhood innovation, poverty and cooperatives. He presented the organization of the neighborhood festivities “Kaya Kaya” with street food and music as a 'shining example' of neighborhood social economic innovation. It will be held coming weekend on August 27th in its 4th edition at the “Otrobanda”-side of the old city center area of Willemstad. “A source of inspiration, a way to attract private investments into the neighborhood economy. In their approaches, neighborhood organizations must be so creative and diverse to discover the potential of their own neighborhoods and develop activities that can bring life again and generate income for these neighborhoods”, Isenia told his audience. The neighborhood profiles which were drawn up in 2010 form a good basis for the newly to design approaches of neighborhood social economical innovation. But they need to be updated. Neighborhood innovation fights poverty and creates employment. In his presentation, Isenia gave an explanation about poverty and employment figures, which concerns all the 65 geographical zones of Curaçao. The figures come from a baseline study, which was finalize in October 2018, the so-called 'Baseline Study Poverty'.
The speaker then showed his audience figures in a table about what happened to the development aid money from the Netherlands, which was distributed through USONA, the agency for management and distribution of Dutch aid for the former five islands of Netherlands Antilles in the period 2004-2014. “A photobook with project figures from USONA shows that Curaçao received a little more than half a billion guilders over a period of ten years. But viewed per capita, this appears to have only been a piece of cake as a contribution to the island's own budget. In short: a drop in the ocean of poverty”, thus an average calculated investment of 16$ amount per inhabitant of Curacao per month. That is why Isenia asks where the money spent at the time actually went. “In hindsight, could these really be called effective expenditures? And from which programs and projects have these emerged?” His lecture therefore ended with 'the lessons learned', taking as an example the 'Corporation Cooperative Mondragón' in Spain, which he calls 'the economic miracle in the field of development of cooperatives'. In 2014 and 2017, he himself went on two excursions to Mondragón, a village of approximately 20,000 inhabitants in the Basque Country, a province located in northern Spain. The village owns 261 companies, including 100 cooperatives and 161 commercial companies that work together under the umbrella organization 'Corporacion Cooperativa Mondragón'.
The relationship was established with the current affairs concerning the cooperative of the general credit union in Curaçao, the ACU. According to Isenia, good cooperatives can combat poverty, a point on which MAN members liked to be informed and about which ideas were exchanged.