Previously Successful Infrastructure Projects

When the Sustainable Communities Corporation (SCC) researched the use of vouchers throughout history, they determined certain times and places where the use of a voucher had a profound, widespread and positive impact on the local economy, far outstripping the impact realized by majority of  voucher projects today.  That led to a deeper probe into what those successful programs had in common that made them stand out from the norm.

The common thread found was that they all used a voucher to fund one or more infrastructure projects in their territory. They did so by hiring workers to perform the work on those projects and paying them directly with the voucher. That is – money was exchanged for labor rather than money for money. This is in contrast to the norm in most CC implementations throughout history that entail using a national currency to purchase the voucher, rather than voucher for labor, as was the case for infrastructure projects, and with ours as well.

Examples

One of the most recent examples occurred in Europe in the middle of the Great Depression. The mayor of a town called Wörgl in Austria, elected to print his own currency and hire workers to do infrastructure projects for the town.  That currency then circulated very rapidly throughout the rest of town in all its businesses. That drove unemployment in the town down from over 30% to near zero in weeks. The experiment was so successful it became known as the Miracle of Wörgl and hundreds of other communities throughout Europe were interested in replicating that effort in their communities, before governments interfered. See this page for more details.

And while the Wörgl experiment lasted only a little over a year, there was a much larger and longer example in history that can prove even more compelling. That example lasted for 250 years (during the central middle ages) and covered most of Europe. It produced prosperity virtually unheard of in most of the world today.  Communities throughout Europe issued their own money to build more than 1,000 cathedrals and over 350,000 churches! (See the video on the home page.) 

Those cathedrals usually took 50 to 100 years to complete, injecting untold amounts of money into their local economies. And those investments not only lifted up those local economies to unprecedented levels, but they continue to pay back those communities to this day, in the form of tourist expenditures, ~800 years after they were built! Almost nothing else in history has yielded such a return on investment. That story is described here.

Applying those concepts in Nigeria 

With respect to infrastructure projects in Nigeria, the list of items under this section detail examples of projects that can be funded with vouchers, but by no means represent all the possible kinds of projects that can be funded so. That is up to the needs and imagination of the residents in each state and their local governments. 

What can you imagine?

• Roads, Bridges, Flood Control, Sanitation and More
• Energy Production, Storage and Distribution Systems
• Transportation Systems
• Low Cost Housing
• Rehabilitating Existing Properties and Blight Remediation
• Environmental Cleanup
• Reforestation and Green Spaces