Mauricio Badaloni spoke on Aconcagua Radio about the Tax Incentive Bill for Education.

This Friday, the Mendoza Legislature hosted a meeting that brought together the productive sector, NGOs, schools, and universities to begin working on the "Vocational Training Credit in Mendoza" bill.

In the program En el medio de todo, on Aconcagua Radio , through Emilce Vargas Ferrara 's mobile phone, Mauricio Badaloni was interviewed, who spoke about that meeting on this draft Law also known as Tax Incentive for Education.

This meeting sought to build on what was started last year and aims to secure a legal instrument that would allow private entrepreneurs to finance educational projects. Badaloni himself considered this to be "a historic milestone at the provincial and regional levels."

—We're with one of the business leaders who is participating in and organizing these meetings. He's Mauricio Badaloni, from the Andesmar Foundation. Could you give us details about this meeting?

—I'm truly pleasantly surprised. It's interesting to have this opportunity at the "House of Laws" to meet together, practically the entire spectrum of private sector institutions, together with a host of school principals, from public schools in the private sector. People from the private sector, provincial legislators, senators have also been present, and, on the other hand, universities and many businesspeople. That truly fills me with pride. We already know Mendoza's philanthropic quality, but that's not enough, so what we're putting forward is an instrument, a bill. We're not here to teach the House of Laws how to make a law, but rather we want to outline our objectives and give examples. One is the Andesmar Foundation, with which we've been managing a privately run public school for over 10 years. Today, organizations, companies, and entrepreneurs are experiencing a deficit, which is the lack of more qualified human resources. We're losing personnel with the skills we need in our productive activities. Not to mention what happens in the inhospitable areas of Mendoza, where there are wineries or agro-industrial establishments that need technical training and the like. Although the schools are very close, there's no contact between school principals and the productive establishments or the managers of those organizations. So, we've made a contribution that has to do with generating. We've stopped talking about public-private partnerships and instead set a clear and concise example, which today would be nothing more and nothing less than this incentive law. A law that allows us to have fiscal bonds with caps, based on projects, with criteria, with great responsibility, to have budgets that don't break the provincial budget structure in the slightest, but do generate a strong contribution by focusing on young people, by focusing on the work they do. We hope the principals of each school will see their schools are productive, and with this tool, we can definitely have additional income for all extracurricular activities. That's part of the focus of the project we're discussing today.

—This is a step toward a regulation that has been in the works for some time, but today, perhaps, it's more of a practical matter. But why does it also represent a milestone for the province?

—It's a milestone for the province because the world of education doesn't exist without the world of work, the world of purpose. What is the reason our young people study? I think that in the third, fourth, and fifth years (of secondary school) we need to work on the purpose of our young people, because that's where we find the energy to continue stimulating our learning. (…) We believe that some steps are missing. Education is sometimes too dominated by the General Directorate of Schools, educational policy, teachers, unions, and the private sector is missing.

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