News that government’s roof repair programme will soon get underway is welcome in several ways. For starters, the persons in question will finally be getting some relief.
It was already evident from driving around and seeing all the tarpaulins, but with more than 900 applications the widespread need is clear. That list has since been narrowed down to 480-plus, which is still a significant number in a relatively small community.
The fact that this includes 250 senior citizens makes the matter even more urgent. A lot of them are part of a priority group of 150 to be tackled during the first phase, for which 5 million Antillean guilders have been reserved.
The other aspect is that the project will create badly-needed work at a time when many are losing jobs and/or income. That’s good for the chosen contractors and their employees, but also for the economy in general because it helps increase local spending.
However, it’s important to coordinate the plans well with those of the White and Yellow Cross Care Foundation (WYCCF), which intends to repair 45 homes of its clients. As a number of these are also elderly, overlap must be prevented, as was the case with government’s basic commodities voucher programme and that of the Red Cross.
In addition, the criteria to qualify must be objective and unambiguous. For example, no mention of having insurance or not was initially made.
But all in all, these initiatives should go a long way towards improving the quality of life for people directly involved and at the same time provide a boost to the business community in terms of greater purchasing power within society. The WYCCF project has the added benefit of offering currently unemployed hospitality industry personnel paid training to work in the construction field.
Much more is obviously required with use of 500 million euros in rebuilding funds made available by the Netherlands via the World Bank, but one simply has to begin somewhere.
