In order to fight poverty and insecurity, the Municipality of Escazú decided to open the Municipal Training Center five years ago.
Arnoldo Barahona, mayor of the canton, said that the idea came after a meeting with companies that did not hire the locals.
Barahona says the main concern from the companies was that there were only two types of residents in the area: people with high professional qualifications and people with minimal education.
Companies were missing the intermediate group. From there we did an inventory of the positions to be opened during the next four years, we located the people and we began to qualify them to be able to fill those positions,”
said Barahona.
This is how the Center started various courses in arts, languages, computer science, leadership and entrepreneurship, which have now multiplied. Therefore, the municipality decided it was necessary to have even greater support for the training they offer. And so the alliance with the National Technical University (UTN) came about.
According to the mayor, the issue goes beyond providing employment opportunities to a certain group of people, it’s about benefiting the whole canton.
In the end, all we want is citizen security, because the problem is that crime growth is closely related to the problem of poverty; and to reduce poverty, people need technical and academic training to get good paid jobs,”
said the mayor.