Today, the Dominican Republic is being subjected to a series of serious and worsening problems that have created a desperate living situation for the low-income sector. In rural areas, this is evidenced by a growing deterioration in the quality of life that has forced the peasant masses to emigrate to urban centers where they hope to find a better future. However, what they find is overcrowding, unemployment, and unsanitary conditions that challenge all human norms of coexistence and mutual charity. The very portrait of the environment and its inhabitants reflects their lost hopes of transforming this reality. Far from improving, it could be argued that the situation is worsening.

However, despite this situation of progressive deterioration, the Dominican Government has proven incapable of attending to and resolving the needs of marginalized neighborhoods where the vast majority of migrants are settled. This fact is manifested in many ways, such as:

• the inability of authorities to define coherent urban development policies and non-compliance with established guidelines;
• environmental pollution due to high population, commercial, and industrial density;
• the unequal distribution of the population in urban space, generating problems of overcrowding and extremely high densities;
• anarchic growth of marginalized neighborhoods;
• Incapacity of the urban economy to absorb a population concentration.

Responding to this situation and in support of the residents living in the marginalized neighborhoods of Santo Domingo, the Dominican Institute for Integral Development, Inc. (IDDI), a private, Dominican, and non-profit institution, has been carrying out a series of development actions based on the following principles:

• All activities are executed based on the concept of integral development.
• It is essential to promote and foster the self-management and self-development of residents so that they can make the necessary decisions about their own destiny.
• To the extent possible, the need for invested costs to be recoverable has been raised.
• Only technical solutions that are within the economic and educational reach of the residents should be promoted.
• It is necessary to respect the existing socio-cultural and economic fabric of neighborhoods to the greatest extent possible.
• Existing human, material, and financial resources in the neighborhoods should be utilized to the fullest extent possible.
• Technical solutions should have low capital investment and be labor-intensive.
• There must be deep respect for existing ecological and biological systems and harmony with them.
• The decision-making process must be completely non-partisan and pluralistic.

On the other hand, the IDDI believes that national development is not solely in the hands of the government, but is everyone's responsibility. Therefore, it understands that it is essential to emphasize that all sectors of Dominican society are actors with specific roles to play and fulfill in this area. Above all, it is necessary for each sector to know its part and that within the totality of our country's development, they understand that in these times of crisis, we cannot afford to compete or duplicate each other's efforts, but rather to complement one another.  

To be able to build a healthy and democratic society, it is necessary to recognize that all those involved in national development understand the need to support community self-management capacity, wherever it comes from. In this way, we are all stakeholders in our country's development.

The role the IDDI plays as an institution supporting the popular sector has not been to solve problems, but to facilitate their organizational and development processes. It has been its responsibility to know when to support existing spontaneous actions and when to introduce innovative processes and mechanisms. In this regard, the IDDI has been cautious in maintaining a vision that, on the one hand, responds to the neighborhood's requests for support, and on the other hand, understands that it has sometimes been necessary to be a catalyst for change by introducing appropriate modifications. Individualistic solutions, isolated from a collective approach, are not promoted.

The IDDI's development activities represent the first time a private sector institution has undertaken actions of this scale and magnitude to benefit Santo Domingo's marginalized settlements. Therefore, these experiences are of significant urban importance, as they demonstrate that by embracing the concept of integral participatory development as a fundamental principle (in which the population becomes aware of and integrated into the entire process of determining their own destiny), it is possible to resolve (even if in the long term) the problems affecting our neighborhoods, while simultaneously raising the standard of living for their inhabitants, but always preserving their sociocultural fabric.

In Santo Domingo specifically, the marginalized neighborhoods themselves are experiencing an annual population growth rate of 10%, even though the country’s overall population is growing at only 2.6% per year; and although they account for 64% of the capital city’s population, they occupy only 19% of its total area.