Before the approval of the 2026 budget, a controversy has arisen and that is that the opinion being debated in Parliament did not include more than S/529 million for 20,000 new scholarships of the State to be granted in that year.
The president of the Council of Ministers, Ernesto Álvarez, argued before the Plenary Session of Congress that the previous administration did not carry out any efforts to finance the new subsidies, but guaranteed that those that are in place will be maintained.
“So far there are 25,000 beneficiaries of Beca 18. There are 25,000 young people who already enjoy and the sustainability of their studies is guaranteed,” he noted.
Given this situation, he pointed out that a way out has to be evaluated, which could be “continuing to increase Beca 18 or studying the possibility of opening more vacancies in prestigious public universities.”
For her part, the former executive director of Pronabec, Alexandra Ames, pointed out that there was a written commitment from the Executive to include the budget to address the scholarships, but noted that in the end this issue was not prioritized.
“The question now is, why doesn’t the current government prioritize this if when it arrived there were already more than 100,000 registered to take the exam? The logical thing is the continuity of a process that had already begun. There was a commitment in the vote of confidence speech,” he highlighted.
OPTIONS
Meanwhile, the former Minister of Economy and Finance (MEF) Luis Miguel Castilla considered that the lack of inclusion in the budget for new scholarships “is a bad sign” for the sector, especially if there was a commitment in this regard.
For this reason, he pointed out that the solution to this problem is to resort to the contingency reserve (which this year amounted to more than S/6.8 billion), which is usually used to respond to natural disasters.
“What has happened is terrible because there was a call and this is a sensitive issue. This has been an error that has to be corrected and to do so through the reservation only a supreme decree is required,” he said in Perú21.
He indicated that another way to make the change is during the debate in the Plenary Session of Congress. However, he warned that this would mean that resources would be withdrawn from another item.
“Within the debate on the budget, a recomposition of the resources that will be allocated to the education sector would have to be made, but for that to happen some other established item would have to be removed,” he highlighted.
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