Education & Professional Qualification in Salvador

 Bahia_Training Program
Bahia_Training Program

Goals:

  • Education for income generation: access to formal education, employment and entrepreneurship
  • Health: raise awareness and combat water-related diseases
  • Human Rights: enhance women's, youth's and children's rights; and gender equity

Services:

  • Project co-creation, implementation, Q&A and reporting
  • Coalition building / collective impact facilitation
  • Fundraising
  • Evaluation
  • Promotion

Partners:

  • FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE (ACCIÓN SOCIAL), Spanish biggest insurance company, third one in the world.
  • CUFA, the leading and largest NGO in Brazil.
  • Salvador Municipality
  • CENPAH (Centro de Pastoral Afro Pe. Heitor Frisotti)

Results:

  • Eighteen participants are now employed
  • Sixteen participants passed ENEM - National exam of medium education
  • Seven participants gained access to university
"This project is an opened door that socially is not open, or there is no intention to open it. It's an expression of solidarity and social partnership in educational"
Profesor Jorge Portugal

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Context:

According to the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme, data from 2012) Brazil is 85th in global ranking with high income inequality despite high growth rates. Brazilian HDI (Human Development Index) is 0.730 (United Nations, data from 2012). This inequality and social exclusion, linked with low workforce qualification, is slowing Brazilian development according to the UN. 

As a reference point, Norway is in first place in the UN's human development ranking with 0.955 points. Niger and Democratic Republic of Congo lie last with 0.304 points.

According to IBGE (Brazilian Statistics Institute, 2010), Bahia State has more than 14 million inhabitants, and over one million live in deprived areas - favelas. Salvador de Bahia, its capital, has more than 2.6 million inhabitants and more than one in three inhabitants, over 882 thousand people, live in favelas

Salvador is the largest city on Northeast coast of Brazil and its educational system is deficient. Less than 850,000 people go to school, over 1.65 million people used to go to school but don’t go anymore and more than 168 thousand people have never been to school

Sussuarana Community has over 150,000 inhabitants and major social problems such as a lack of education, security and transport, absence of leisure areas, high rates of prostitution, drug dependency, violence. Official statistics of these areas are not available.

When we began the project, participants’ lack of self esteem was easily perceived by instructors. We had good results, enhancing self esteem and proactivity through group events, motivational speaches from famous artists like Rapper MVBill, cultural activities, etc.

In general participants have dysfunctional families with conflict in the home. Many students, despite being less than 20 years old, already have children. So attendance levels are a high risk to be managed. Many participants have to do basic jobs and could not go to class.

The main difficulty is with writing skills. So we added a writing course. 

Challenge:

Our approache is to contribute to the development of Sussuarana through education, towards university access and professional qualification to generate incomes. We delivered the following training programs:

To gain access to university:

Geography, writing, grammar, literature, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, current affairs, history, geography and English.

To find a job:

Communication and customer orientation, Structuring of CV and interview techniques, introduction to sales and marketing, administrative, telemarketing, dynamics to develop self awareness.

Social Technology:

• Co-creation with local grassroots leaders. I am always looking for ways to empower local grassroots leaders.

• The operational team is comprised of people who live in the communities and know, from the inside, their needs and issues. Local people have to be the protagonists of their social change.

• Culture (music, theatre, local culture like capoeira) was used to engage participants and their families. It's important to learn while having fun.

• Visits to theatres, museums and to historic points of Salvador to motivate and engage and integrate social groups while enhancing knowledge of the city. 

• Participants’ families are engaged in the learning process. 

• Citizenship, education for diversity, health care and sustainability are embedded in the training program

More than concrete and measurable results, it's a huge impact in the community self esteem enhancement; new perspectives of life; positive references; communities autonomy and resilience empowerment, also because all the operational team is composed by residents, living as a legacy the expertise inside the community etc. Each person who participate in the program is an agent of change, scaling up impacts through a multiplication process.
 
Related publications: 

Coallition building, fundrasing and projects realization FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE & CUFA
Fundacion Mapfre press room