International Fellowship Programme Changes Face of Education in Brazil

By an IPS Correspondent Reprint | | Print |

New York, Nov 28 2012 (IPS) - During the presentation “Affirmative action in Brazil: From 1990s to the Supreme Court decision 2012” at Columbia University,  Joan Dassin, executive director of the International Fellowship Programme (IFP), highlighted the evaluation results of the Ford Foundation’s  IFP in Brazil and its progress during the past decade.

Ford Foundation IFP is an affirmative action programme that offers advanced opportunities for studies to the most vulnerable populations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Russia.

“The first indigenous person ever to receive a doctorate in Brazil was an IFP fellow,” Dassin proudly announced during the presentation.  She also emphasised that the programme in Brazil aims beyond the indigenous population, although this community forms a “critical mass”.

Focussing primarily on black and indigenous Brazilians with few educational opportunities, the programme stood out because it was centralized around quantifiable variables like region, occupational and educational levels of parents  which help determine the social background of applicants–  and not so much solely around the racial quotas debate.

In the midst of national debates on social inequalities in Brazil – impacted by variables such as region, race, ethnicity and gender,  the actual policies on affirmative action were implemented during the late 1990s – specifically during the last 10 years of the two administrations of former president Lula da Silva.

Dassin explained that the IFP started out as a “global programme” in 2001 and was implemented in a “somewhat decentralized way”.

“We were the first self-acknowledged and self-identified affirmative action programme in Brazil. And that created an interesting environment, which was soon followed by  an enormous demand during the 8-year selection procedure and regardless of specific requirements incoming applications mounted up to 9.000 over the course of this period,” she added.

“This shows how important not only the knowledge they acquire of their graduate studies , but also the credential effect being people with advanced degrees, which is a privilege formerly received and exclusively belonging to the white dominant society in Brazil,” added Dassin. She also said that it opens a lot of doors for them as they have more convening and political power which “allow them to use their scientific knowledge in ways that benefit their own communities.”

Jorge Balan, adjunct director at the School of International and Public Affairs,  said  athough currently more than 80 universities in Brazil have adopted the affirmative action programme, there still exist crucial challenges.

Though the programme aims to keep all fields of study available for these students,  access to highly competitive scientific fields on undergraduate levels can be complicated for members of marginalised populations due to their low levels in basic knowledge making them unprepared for entrance exams at public schools and universities.

“When I studied in São Paulo during the early 1970s, you didn’t see black faces except for African exchange students. They were just absent. And later on during research, I realised just how underrepresented black, mixed-race and indigenous people were and still are in the Brazilian context,” Dassin said.