PhD. Martín Burt, founder and executive director of the Fundación Paraguaya, presented to the President of the National Congress, Senator Blas Llano, a draft bill for Poverty Elimination in Paraguay, which ensures that, by training around 8,000 officials that already exist in the different Ministries of the State, and then appoint them as family extension agents, poverty can be eliminated.

The Fundación Paraguaya, using its methodology called the Stoplight, also created by its Director and promoted in over 20 countries, has managed to accompany more than 30,000 Paraguayan families to overcome income poverty during the last 5 years.

The draft bill proposes to measure poverty in a multidimensional way and not just as income, use technology to ask families about their needs; and, thus provide specific georeferenced information on the situation (of each family) to the more than 96 social programs that the Government has, aiming at using state resources more efficiently.

The Fundación Paraguaya has won several international awards, including the “Juscelino Kubitschek” Visionaries Award, granted by the Inter-American Development Bank, which selected a Paraguayan organization for the first time among more than 600 organizations in Latin America.

Another of the innovative points of this proposal is the challenge of not contemplating the Paraguayan population by number of inhabitants, but rather, by number of families: “In Paraguay, there are not an estimated of 7,500,000 people, there are 1,600,000 families. A child cannot overcome poverty alone and we cannot consider that a mother whose child does not get vaccinated is out of poverty. If we consider the reality from the family itself, it is easier to give effective and real solutions,” said Luis Fernando Sanabria, General Manager of the Fundación Paraguaya.

“It is hoped that this Law can be the gateway to end poverty in Paraguay, in a real and definitive way,” said Martin Burt.