The Mugica neighborhood, popularly known as Villa 31, in Retiro, is decorated for the Fiestas. There are red bows attached to the doors and some bright garlands coiled over the bars that protect the structures that grow upwards, in precarious buildings of up to five stories. It's Friday mid-morning and the streets are packed. Every once in a while, the walkers open up to let the “motocarros” pass, motorcycles that have a small trailer behind them, more suitable than cars or trucks to move through the narrow corridors.

On Aplaca street, one of the neighborhood's commercial arteries, there is a dietetic and a cleaning supplies store, and further on, a hairdresser's, a nail salon, a hardware store, a cafe that exhibits donuts and cinnamon rolls. , a clothing store, a pet shop, a barbershop, a photocopier, an optician with "in-house manufacturing". Christmas trees, fruit salad, juices, jewelry, toys are sold on the street. It is difficult to think of an item that is not present in these more than 70 blocks, where nearly 50,000 people live.

This is a neighborhood that, like so many others, lives off the popular economy, that informal productive circuit that encompasses around 7.5 million people in Argentina and 410,000 in the City of Buenos Aires alone. With a saturated offer within their own limits, one of the main challenges faced by workers is to look for clients outside the neighborhood and integrate the enterprises into the formal value chains of the public and private sectors. Something that, with the impulse of the Law for the Promotion of the Social and Popular Economy, sanctioned unanimously in the Buenos Aires Legislature in December 2020, began to take shape.

This law proposes tools to solve the three main obstacles of this type of business: limits on its capacity to produce; unstable and inbred marketing channels and lack of financing. Among other things, it creates training programs, a line of economic incentives from Banco Ciudad, a fund that combines public and private capital to finance productive projects (Fondes, which will be active from February 2022) and establishes a special regulatory framework for that cooperatives can be suppliers of the State.

There are some pioneering ventures on this path. Las Palmeras is a restaurant located on Carlos Perette street that, in the midst of a pandemic, joined the Orders Now delivery platform and began to ship ceviche, causa and other Peruvian dishes to Recoleta, Retiro, Congreso and the downtown area.

“The only difference is that Orders Now sends everyone delivery and not here because the delivery men are afraid to come to this area. So I hire them; I pay a fixed amount to some guys so they can do my deliveries by bicycle,” says José Luis Zapata, who opened the store six years ago. It offers its dishes to customers in the most elegant neighborhoods of the capital at the same price paid by those who sit down to eat in this space with wooden tables, decorated with fish tanks and long-leaved succulents.

The Minister of Human Development and Habitat of the City, María Migliore, points out that there are three areas in which the neighborhood has the greatest potential as a supplier: textiles, graphics and catering. “The law seeks to formalize and grow the work that already exists in the neighborhood, which is a lot; It's not that it invents entrepreneurs,” she explains.

Migliore receives a group of journalists at the office of the Center for Entrepreneurial and Labor Development (Cedel), located in front of the highest block in the neighborhood (the average is 2.5 floors, but here some structures have up to five) in the place that before was “the Tarzan shed”, a demolished narco bunker. On the table there is coffee from Coffee Time, a place that opened less than a month ago in the neighborhood, and croissants made by Paraje Kue, which occupies one of the commercial spaces located on the ground floor of the houses built in the neighborhood, where the families that lived under the Illia highway were relocated, in precarious structures (some with the highway as a roof), which were demolished.

The name Paraje Kue is a Guarani expression that is difficult to explain, says Ysabel Franco Benegas, 54, the owner of the place. She could be summed up in “what was”, a nostalgic reference to Paraguay, from where she emigrated in the 90s to work as a domestic worker in Argentina.

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Ysabel started making cooking her job eight years ago, when she had to leave her job as a teacher at a private school to stay at her house to take care of her grandson. Her niece had opened a bakery in downtown Buenos Aires, on Tacuarí and Hipólito Yrigoyen, and asked her for two dozen empanadas to see if they sold. "They all came out and that's how we started," she says.

Little by little she began to add private clients, to take care of the lunch of the staff of some companies, she entered as a supplier of the City Government and a food stall that is on the platform of the Miter train, for which this morning she dispatched 108 empanadas . “It is important to sell outside because here in the neighborhood many people are dedicated to food,” she explains. In between, she took business management courses and obtained loans that allowed her to buy another oven, a fryer.

There was a moment in the pandemic when the demand stopped, "because the neighborhood was classified as prohibited." "They said that all the bugs came out of the village here and people were afraid, they didn't want to buy what was produced here," she says. Little by little the sale began to recover and when her niece decided to close the bakery in the downtown area, which had collapsed due to the absence of office workers, between the two of them they decided to bring part of the team to the neighborhood and rent this place, which they opened in September and for which They pay $30,000 a month. This Friday at noon, the place is full of policemen who stopped for lunch. “I don't put the sign out on the street because I'm afraid I won't be able to supply it,” says Ysabel, who started cooking this morning at 5:45 a.m. to prevent a scheduled power outage from allowing her to meet the scheduled orders.

She also sells empanadas and cakes through the online store Recoveco, the marketplace that brings together entrepreneurs from all over the neighborhood, where these days you can find sweet bread for $910 and Christmas boxes for $1,700. The Valor Popular platform, donated by Accenture Argentina, will also be available soon, bringing together the offer of productive units from different popular neighborhoods, so that companies from all over the country, increasingly interested in making “triple impact” purchases, can access it. An example: this year Toyota made 7,000 corporate gifts with seedlings from La Vivera Orgánica, a women's enterprise from the Rodrigo Bueno neighborhood, and the Hilton hotel hired it to install a vegetable garden in the hotel. This is one of the opportunities that workers in the neighborhood have, who, based on the law, also have a seal (“Popular Value”) to certify their products.

Among the services offered for people from “outside”, there are also the tours organized by the Ajayu tourist agency, which for $1,900 invites you to walk around the neighborhood, try its food and learn about its history. This community tourism agency is one of the 1,500 productive units (made up of 5,100 people) in the neighborhood that are registered in the Registry of Productive Units of the Popular and Social Economy (Rupepys), created by the law. It's just a small sample; The objective of the City Government is to reach the registration of 3,500 productive units by the end of 2022.

"We have to make the effort to think of social policy not only as containment and assistance, but hand in hand with productive economic policy," insists Migliore, in a speech very similar to that of social organizations and at odds with that of leaders of both the opposition as well as the ruling party that tend to leave out of "the solutions" the work that people already do outside the formal circuits.

“I think there is a consensus in the political leadership that the plans must be transformed into formal employment, but the discussion is on how, and that is where the paradigm of 'genuine employment' must be put in crisis, which is in crisis throughout the world. world," says the minister. “We work on training together with the private sector so that companies can hire people from the neighborhood, and it is important to do so because it changes the family history of those who access it, but we believe that this will be a minority percentage. Traditional work, as it was known until now, is not the one that is going to give us a short-term and scaled solution," says Migliore, for whom the key is to formalize, grow and integrate work into value chains. that already exists in the neighborhoods.

SD