COSMOL, the Montero Cooperative of Services, is the institution in charge of the sustainable management of the Services of Drinkable Water and Sanitary Sewer System of Montero city.

Since 2001, COSMOL have been building an anthropocentric vision with social participation where the basic sanitation and water supply are conceived as a human right, and where the human being is the beginning, middle and end of all our activity.

Based on these new conceptions, a strategic alliance has taken place among COSMOL and the social movements expressed in the Territorial Based Organizations (OTB), the Neighborhoods Associations, the Committee of Surveillance, The Workforce Regional Union, and public sectors as Education and Health.

This strategic alliance expresses into the transformation of the cooperative work as a way to fight poverty, through the main principle of cooperatives: solidarity.

What it is all about is giving a Medical Family Insurance for all the partners and non partners of COSMOL (tenants, landlords, etc.) who pays for the services of Drinkable Water and Sanitary Sewer system.

Solidarity also means giving our partners and non partners a Mortuary Insurance; the construction of Sanitary Modules and the donation of materials for the connection to the sewer system to the partners of less economic resources; and the contributions to the people security.

The setting-up of the direct democracy with the universal, direct and secret vote to choose the district directors, the President and Vice-president of the cooperative; the construction of Educational Modules of Basic Sanitation for Montero's 56 Public School Units; the creation and qualification of the FACILITATORS OF THE CHANGE, a team composed by 30 professors and personal of health that have incorporated the basic sanitation as a crossing and multidisciplinary matter; and, finally, the System of Total Transparency that has been implemented by Internet and the low rates of the Sewer system of the country, are also some components of this initiative.

This whole process takes us toward a new culture of the Basic Sanitation and toward an economic and technical sustainability, based on a social sustainability, with a current covering of 98% in water and of 65% in Sewer system; besides a debt of 5% and a recovery of water in invoice that it surpasses 80%.