By IPS Correspondents
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 23 2004 (IPS)

Businessman Rodrigo Baggio, 32, decided 11 years ago to do what he could to "put an end to the digital apartheid" that prevails in Brazil.

He created an organisation that has graduated 501,000 people in professions related to information technologies, not only in this country, but in 10 more across three regions.

The "great social challenge of the 21st century" is the digital inclusion of citizens, says Baggio. The Committee for the Democratisation of Information Technologies (CDI), which he founded, has taken computer and Internet skills to the ‘favelas’ (shanty towns) of Brazil’s big cities, to high-security prisons, to indigenous communities in the Amazon and to tens of thousands of poor children.

"To promote digital including using information technologies is to promote social change. Technology is not an end, it is a means for changing society," Baggio told IPS during the Fourth World Summit on Media for Children and Adolescents, which concluded Friday in Rio de Janeiro.

"It is not simply about transforming society, but about making it a just society in which equality and solidarity prevail," he said.

It is about "making use of information technology as a revolutionary tool for changing lives in the community."

The education centres run by CDI are not mere computer schools, but rather "schools of citizenship in the broadest sense," said Baggio.

Who pays for the 833 information technology and citizenship centres included in the project? They are self-sustaining entities, financed by the class fees, which are a merely symbolic sum, but enough to keep the schools running, he said.

In some cases, the fee might be one-and-a-half dollars a month. In others, the students pay for their studies by providing services to the school. "We try to inculcate the idea that nothing is free, that you always pay something, whether with money or services."

But the computer and digital video equipment used in many of the schools are acquired through resources coming from big Brazilian companies and transnationals, and from the Inter-American Development Bank and the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

The schools are autonomous, and aim to familiarise the students with the exercise of their citizenship. It is the community that inserts the local reality into the course content, applying the method of Paulo Freire (1921-1997), an internationally renowned Brazilian philosopher and teacher, who revolutionised education and was persecuted by the military dictatorship (1964-1985).

As such, the students identify and discuss issues taken from their communities to apply them in their studies. They research those questions and develop a web page, a community newspaper or a local radio station, for example.

The schools are interconnected using the Internet, allowing them to exchange information and to replicate the best experiences as they unfold.

"We Brazilians have taken the English term ‘computer’ and adapted it to mean the information technology machines. But the Indians didn’t accept it. Not long ago, a chief suggested a new name for the computer, an indigenous word that means ‘box for accumulating language’," says Baggio.

According to a recent survey, 87 percent of the graduates of the CDI schools said their lives had improved thanks to the courses. Many said that the experience helped them to escape negative situations, such as drug trafficking, and to begin a new life.

Other encouraging examples are the psychiatric patients from a Rio hospital who were integrated into community work efforts, including several who have become teachers, and the geographically isolated indigenous villages in the Amazon that are now connected to the Internet.

Based on the Brazilian initiative, similar centres have been launched in Angola, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Japan, Mexico, South Africa and Uruguay.

CDI’s achievements in Brazil go quite a bit farther than the timid efforts by the government, despite the development of a public project for community wide-band Internet, with 2,500 antennae installed in low-income schools and neighbourhoods.

The CDI experience summarises some of the principal values of the Summit on Media for Children and Adolescents, where the debate centres on television programming content, video games, the ethical and professional responsibilities of those who design computer programmes, and the roll of the child and adolescent audiences of the media.

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