The city of Rio de Janeiro is trying to untie one of the most intricate knots of Brazilian education: the identification of children 6-14 years of age still out of school and their return to the classroom.
The mission is complex: Brazil reached 97.7% of enrollments among the age indicated. The achievement was driven by the fact that most of the income transfer programs created in recent years conditioned the release of funds to the presence of children in school. Still, nearly a million of them are still out of school. In the case of the state capital, they totaled 24,455 in 2010 – 3.1% of the total universe – according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics Census. These children and their families are one of the greatest social challenges the country faces, as they remain “invisible” to public policies.
The phenomenon is not unique to Brazil. Within the United Nations, the second Millennium Goal provides for the universalization of primary education from the enrollment of all children as from 6 years of age. Worldwide, the goal is to include at least ten million children and adolescents from 34 countries. The Aluno Presente project – a partnership between the Rio de Janeiro City Hall, the NGO Cidade Escola Aprendiz and the Education Above AII Foundation, of Qatar – is part of this effort.
The project’s strategy to find these children and families goes through the intersection of information of the municipal school system itself – most of the children have been to school and left for various reasons – with the information collected by 50 professionals in charge of finding these children in all the city’s neighborhoods. In general, they are in the poorest and peripheral ones and many have special needs.
Once located, the challenge is to overcome the conditions that led to their leaving or not enrolling in a school: lack of documentation, frequent change of residence, neglect or lack of family structure, early entry into the informal labor market, level of violence in the area where they live, etc.
The life stories of these people demonstrate that this phenomenon – just as the school evasion one – will only be solved when we recognize that education is too important to be an exclusive responsibility of the school and its professionals. Meeting it requires the construction of intersectoral policies that take education, health, social development, housing, transportation, and global into account.
The contemporary social challenges require a shared action between state agencies and civil society actors, as well as the participation of companies in their territories of action. From this integration will emerge an innovative social technology capable of dealing with the complexity of serving the people that are “invisible” to the State.
‘Aluno Presente’ demonstrates the importance of this integration. It has already led over five thousand children back to school and is consolidating a global database on the profile of these children, their families and the main causes of being out of school. When it reaches its end in 2016, the project will deliver to the city of Rio and the country a technology that can be replicated not only in Brazilian cities, but in all countries where there are children and families suffering a process of social invisibility offensive to human dignity.
Natacha Costa is the Executive Director of the Cidade Escola Aprendiz Association
Eliana Sousa Silva is director and founder of NGO Redes da Maré, researcher in public security and visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at USP
