OPINION

Published Monday, April 11, 2005
In Brazil, Looking to Youth as Agents of Change
by Neylar Vilar Lins and Maria Adenil Vieira

This year begins the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). We believe that young people - when educated, organized, and equipped with a vision for social change – can be one of the most powerful forces in the development of underdeveloped countries. Recently in Brazil, hundreds of teenagers participated in an experience of “Education for Sustainable Development - the Alliance with Adolescents Program,” a local initiative in rural Northeast Brazil (Goitá Basin, Pernambuco). What they learned is hoped to have a significant impact on their communities, which share family agriculture as the basic economic activity.

This initiative, which centers on education for the development of youth leaders, has been simultaneously developed in three micro-regions in the Brazilian northeast since 1999 through a strategic alliance between the Ayrton Senna Institute, the Odebrecht and Kellogg Foundations, and the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) and with the coordination of Instituto Aliança, an OSCIP (Civil Society Organization of Public Interest) created in 2002. We believe the Alliance with Adolescents program can serve as a strong example for both Brazil and other countries to look to their youth as an important resource and agents for social change.  

Education for Sustainable Development involves both education and the transformation of a community’s economic, social, political, and cultural conditions.  This is a tall order for which we chose a local development approach, a model that involves participative planning, gives value to local assets and works with the limited economic activity of the three micro-regions where the Aliança Project acts.

The concept of inter-generational sustainability is an intrinsic aspect of the program and assumes that teenagers can overcome the cycles of poverty, violence, ignorance, and disrespect of citizenship rights that tears at our social fabric. Each teenager has the potential to develop him or herself, to break the cycle that reproduces poverty, and to build a family with a new base and, through it, a new community.   These teens need opportunities to develop as citizens, as individuals, and as social agents of change, channeling their potential toward the construction of a fairer and more democratic society.

The objective of the Agents of Local Development (ALD) Project, implemented in the Goitá Basin, Pernambuco, was to train 480 teenagers to be agents for change and to improve the life conditions of their families, their communities, and the micro-region in which they live. 

The first year of training prepared youngsters, through successive modules, to intervene in the social, economic, and environmental problems of the micro-region. During their second year of training, they received training to develop skills and competencies necessary for their insertion in the productive chain of organic agriculture -- the basic economic activity of the micro-region. Through this training, they examined issues of the rural economy in an attempt to understand and transform the context of poverty and exclusion that affects family agriculture in the Goitá Basin.

The youth participants developed a critical outlook on the family properties — their possibilities and challenges — and learned how to plan their usage according to the principles of organic agriculture. During their fieldwork, they became specialists in alternative technologies, learning processes that will defend the environment and bring a new dynamic to their properties and family agriculture.

Through entrepreneurial training, they learned how to plan their actions, define objectives and goals for their businesses, and choose the best strategies to achieve them. This training enabled youngsters to acquire a new way of perceiving, understanding, feeling, acting, and interacting with work.  It also helped them to construct a collective knowledge base within their community. Based on a diagnosis of the main problems of their municipality, groups researched and delved deeply into important issues, taking them back to the community and discussing the interventions needed. The mobilization and intervention built collectively gave the teenagers experience and practice as agents of local development.

The program’s content, the competencies acquired, and the educational itineraries were important elements in the process, but the main factor for transformation and empowerment of the youngsters in the Goitá Basin was the quality of the relationship between educators and students.  Teachers who learned ways to perceive and act with young people were able to demonstrate a genuine faith in our participants and their potential as strategic actors for change.  This, along with a focus on youngsters as partners in all phases of the process, as participants, authors, and agents of local development in their communities, reestablished the youngsters’ self-esteem, self-trust and their hope for a better future. The project also helped strengthen youth associations such as centers, cultural groups, clubs, communities, youth organizations, and promoted an exchange of experiences and the creation of networks.

Family participation was another critical aspect of the project.  In order for teenagers to exert an effective influence in the family culture and property, there must be a commitment on the part of their parents and siblings to their training process, since the acquired knowledge will have an immediate influence in reorganizing and improving the family’s property. 

The Aliança Institute believes that this project helped stir social movement that will be driven by the youngsters through their active and transformative participation in cooperatives, associations, councils, development forums, youth networks, and small businesses in their communities. We believe that through this type of stimulation, youth in Brazil – and all over Latin America – will be able to help promote sustainable development and job opportunities for themselves, their families, and their communities.

The challenge that we face now is to devise ways of implementing this pilot practice on a large scale, in micro-regions of rural Northeast Brazil. In a country of continental dimensions, it is not enough to have a new model of education for development of young people that shown results in pilot implementations. We need to formulate designs that can train youth as agents of change on a large scale, without losing the quality of participatory strategies that proved to be effective in small and controlled settings.

Maria Adenil Vieira is a Psychologist and Project Coordinator for the Aliança Institute, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Graduate School of Education through the Risk and Prevention Program. Neylar Lins is the president of the Aliança Institute.