EDUCATION-BRAZIL: Novel Programme Offers Dropouts a Second Chance

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 13 1998 (IPS) - Young primary school dropouts aged 18 and above in Brazil now have a chance to get back into the mainstream rather than yield to the temptation of turning to crime in the absence of opportunity.

The Voluntary Civil Service (SCV), created by the National Human Rights Secretariat, the federal labour ministry and the state secretariats of labour, began in April with 3,100 youths in Rio de Janeiro state and about half that number in Brasilia.

Next year, the programme will be expanded to between seven and nine more states. The target is to have 300,000 volunteers by the year 2002, “three times the number of young people recruited each year into the Armed Forces,” said Jose Gregori, head of the National Human Rights Secretariat.

The SCV offers young people who risk marginalization a chance to finish primary school, which usually takes children eight years. It also offers courses on human rights, computing and small- business training.

The volunteers, called ‘agents of the future’ receive a monthly allowance of 50 dollars for the nine months of service, during which they study from Monday through Friday.

In turn, they help their communities at least five hours a week, mostly on Saturdays, donating blood and participating in awareness campaigns to prevent car accidents, environmental pollution and endemic diseases like dengue. They also clean up their neighbourhoods, plant community gardens, and repair schools.

The idea, said Gregori, is “to prevent unemployment from forcing them into a life of drugs and crime,” and to broaden their chances of becoming integrated into society and the workplace. In this way, they are more likely to become productive citizens, he explained.

The SCV actively promotes such social integration and helps young people go through the difficult transition to adulthood. Military service used to do that, but it now takes in fewer than 10 percent of all young people in Brazil. That is why other options are necessary, said Rubem Cesar Fernandes, coordinator of Viva Rio, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that is overseeing the volunteer programme in Rio de Janeiro.

Moreover, only certain groups of young people are chosen for the Armed Forces – to be accepted, one must have finished primary school, a requirement linked to the sophisticated technology of the weapons and equipment a soldier has to handle.

The SCV has taken up the cause of those excluded from military service, who face even greater marginalization in the new information society, according to Fernandes.

In Rio de Janeiro, a state with one of the highest education rates in Brazil, 60 percent of the 82,000 adolescents who turn 18 each year have not completed their eight years of primary school.

“It would be ideal to incorporate half of these young people into the voluntary civil service” so as to have a broad social impact, said Fernandes, but there are no resources for a rapid expansion of the programme.

The results of the SCV are promising, said Mauricio Lissovsky, education coordinator for Viva Rio. “We’ve already seen a difference in the communities in which the programme operates.”

A case in point is Valencia, a municipality of 60,000 inhabitants located 160 kms from Rio de Janeiro, where the establishment of an SCV unit led to the rehabilitation of the local agriculture school, which was in a state of disrepair.

At the start of the year, the school had just 30 students and it was on the verge of closing, according to Gilmar Carlos Belm, the SCV teaching coordinator in Valencia. “Now it has 150 students, its installations have been rebuilt, and it is once again producing vegetables, fruits, cheese, jams and sweets,” said Belm.

The SCV unit – which was set up at the agriculture school at the suggestion of its alumni association – helped restore the prestige of the institution, which is supported by the state government. The result was that local students became more interested in attending the school.

In the state of Rio de Janeiro, there are 104 SCV units in 34 municipalities, each with 25 volunteers and up to five alternates waiting to replace any who quit the programme. The drop-out rate is estimated at 15 percent.

The organizers try to make sure there is a gender balance in the composition of each group: women are 44.4 percent of the volunteers who, according to Lissovsky, have shown a surprisingly keen interest in courses on citizenship and human rights.

The programme does face some drawbacks such as its complex structure. It is coordinated in each state by an NGO, while local groups such as neighbourhood and community associations that host the units select the volunteers and ensure that the conditions the SCVs need so as to function are met.

Then again, there are many guides and coordinators for primary education, computer training, human rights or community action, all of which makes for “a great heterogeneity that is hard to adjust”, Lissovsky explained.

Another problem is that many local groups are poorly run, which means Viva Rio has to work hard to back them up, although this also produces a positive spinoff by improving the quality of the community organisations.

Other difficulties are violence and indiscipline. Many of the volunteers “live on the fringes of crime,” said Lissovsky, pointing out that one youth was murdered by his former drug- trafficking associates who did not accept his ‘desertion’. That forced the SCV to provide life and accident insurance for all participants in the programme.

Early pregnancies affect about 30 percent of the female volunteers, although they do not drop out of the programme. “Pregnancy is not disease,” explained Danielle Teixeira Seara, who on 27 May became the first volunteer to give birth during the SCV.