Brazil
The Associação Comunitária Monte Azul (ACMA) ha as main goal to foster human development. They contribute forbetter life conditions of 5000 families throughout two favelas (slums) and one disadvantaged rural area in Sao Paulo – Brazil through projects in education, healthcare, arts, culture and environment. These includesa number of daycares, pre-school and after-school clubs, workshops in employment skills for youngsters, a health clinic, an environmental project, a cultural centre, besides other projects.
In partnership with SOFIA, has ACMA created the Youth Empowerment project. The goal is that young people enjoys their right of equality through social inclusion and their right of security through a dissemination of peace culture. This project wants to empower young people to engage on their community in order to promote their social inclusion and to prevent them to get involved with criminality.
In the beginning of 2019 SOFIA and ACMA ran a pre-study financed by Sida via Forum Syd to test the project idea and work for an application for Sida finance for a bigger project.
We involved seven young people from the Monte Azul area as “young consults”. Those consults created five meetings to brainstorm about the needs of the young people in the community of Monte Azul and how a project could attends to those and truly create a change for them so they can enjoy their human rights.
After an introduction about basic human rights, each young participant have led one meeting where at the community where their perspectives about how they enjoy their rights has been discussed. All the meetings combined a discussion part and an cultural or social activity based on the knowledge and initiatives of the young consults. With that we intended to make the young people feel empowered and included in their communities. All meetings have been registered and the results of the meetings gave us a good base on what could be done in a longer project. The fact that young people are not seen and become apathic about their rights and obligations have been discussed in many meetings, and a project that aims to empower young people to engage in their community was seen positively in the community.
A form was also created and applied in all participants at the meetings. The form included questions about peoples knowledge about their human rights and about the things they wished to have mora access to in their communities and in life. The results of the research gave us a good idea of the context for young people in the area of Monte Azul. The research showed that many of the interviewed are not well informed of their Human Rights and have different and limited ideas on what they are and how they enjoy them. It got also clear that 84% of the participants do not feel capable to either set professional goals, or to chaise them. The need of a project that gives tuition to be able to feel more empowered to chaise their ideas became clear.
We are now in the process of planing a project!
