Outside the home of President Guillermo Lasso, located in Samborondón, the Minister of Transport and Public Works, Darío Herrera, and the Minister of Economy and Finance, Pablo Arosemena Marriott, announced this Thursday afternoon, February 23, the Investment Project 2023, which will to increase public works, social investment and investment in security.

Arosemena explained that after the last meeting, the economic front decided to make important investments in these three sectors and that this is “the result of the fiscal order lasting two years and will only allow more investments to be harvested”.

In social, The investment will amount to about 15,000 million dollars, and the priority will be health, medicine and education.

In public works, investments will be made in roads, he indicated and said that President Guillermo Lasso had agreed to make efforts to obtain financing to have $1,000 million.

Regarding investment in security, Arosemena explained that both the national police and the armed forces have prepared budgets and go hand in hand with fiscal efforts. what the country is doing is expected to have more than 3000 million dollars this year, which he described as a record number, but completely justified due to the crisis the country is going through.

Arosemena said that the stated amount will be made available to security sector institutions, but yes among the actions that will be seen will be a reduction in the number of police officers by the entry of 10,000 police officers per year in 2023 and 2024 and 7,000 in 2025.

As for investment in public works, it will mainly be directed to roads. The Minister of Transport and Public Works, Darío Herrera, said the increase would be around $600 million in addition to the $400 million the portfolio currently has due to the balance of investments in new works.

Of this, 90 percent will be allocated to road infrastructure. This investment will be realized in a period of 27 months, and he pointed out that it will be done with priorities and a social focus.

Herrera explained that in the last seven months, together with governors and other actors in society, they identified urgent road needs in 23 provinces and created a matrix that includes more than 170 projects totaling up to 1,000 million dollars.

“These are priority works for citizens to meet real needs, not works that the minister wants, not works that contractors want, but those that citizens need and generate economic recovery,” he said.

For his part, Arosemena explained that the country gets all these resources from different sources, first of all from the fiscal effort and financing from multilateral organizations such as CAF, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank, obtained through the fiscal mandate that Ecuador has.