Brazil: Politics, Economy, and Education in Sao Paulo -Instituto Gerando Falcões-

Feb 10

Written By Anirudh Sudhir, Edoardo Ghirardo and Viola Lorenzi

1.Introduction: Brazil’s socio-economic situation.

With an estimated Gross Domestic Product of over 1.877 trillion USD, the economy of Brazil is the largest in South America and the twelfth largest in the world. At the same time, however, despite its 26% increase over the last 40 years, Brazil’s GDP per capita is still lower than most of western countries and some of its South American neighbors. Moreover, the rise in GDP was not accompanied by a comparable decrease in economic inequality as measured by the GINI coefficient, which dropped from 57.9% in 1981 to 48.9% in 2020, remaining among the highest in the world.

One of the most worrying aspects of Brazil’s inequality is the staggering socio-economic divide between cities and favelas, ( highly-densely populated neighborhoods of illegally built houses and sheds). Originally built as a solution to the lack of affordable housing in the country after the abolition of slavery (1888), favelas grew in number and size especially during the rural exodus of the 1970s. Currently, around 98% of the households that live in these neighborhoods belong to Brazil’s lower and middle classes. Over the years, numerous mass evictions have taken place to curb the spread of favelas. However, most of these attempts failed since they did not tackle the root of the problem: Brazil’s economic inequalities, partially caused by the unevenly distributed access to education. Indeed, only the country’s upper class can afford private primary and secondary schools, while most of the working class attends lower-quality public institutions. Universities do not change the game: the highest-ranked academic institutions in the country, albeit public, have selective admission criteria that privilege students with a higher-quality education background.

2.Gerando Falcoes

However, there is a solution to these issues. Created in 2011 by social entrepreneur Eduardo Lyra, Gerando Falcões (“Raising Falcons'' in English) is a social development organization in Sao Paulo that aims at eliminating poverty in Brazil and tackling the issue of education among favelas. The organization offers teenagers living in favelas multidisciplinary training through a variety of projects that promote development, social justice and equal access to opportunities. Kids, thus, receive the adequate preparation to apply to the Falcons University, a free, six-month program that features 12 learning modules including “favela expertise, private sector expertise, public policies, technology, and innovation.” Afterwards, students are followed for 3 and a half years, allowing them to fully develop social entrepreneurship skills and perhaps start their own business. The first step to shape tomorrow’s leaders is empowering kids to take charge of their lives by showing them that they can pursue different life paths than that they were given. “Não importa de onde você vem, mas pra onde você vai”. The past, of course, will influence but not determine who they will be.

Gerando Falcoes has positively impacted poverty since it started operating. It helped develop dozens of social service providers that assist more than 200,000 people in 1,700 favelas. However, this organization cannot solve the problem of poverty and provide education to lower-income families by itself. National and local government action is essential to achieve these goals.

3. Government action

With a new government settled in, it is still unclear how much attention the education sector will receive. What is beyond doubt, nonetheless, is that, in his first stint as President (2003-2012), Lula was broadly concerned by this domain and achieved significant results. His predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who governed the country from 1995 to 2002, made sweeping changes to address social inequality in the country. He introduced, for instance, the Bolsa Escola program in 2001, which provides payments to families whose kids attend at least 85% of school days. Even though he did not explicitly expand on the gains made by his predecessor at the level of primary and secondary school, Lula introduced in 2005 a scholarship program (Programa Universidade para Todos) to help socially disadvantaged students enroll in universities.

Then, Lula designed a more comprehensive social welfare program (the Bolsa Familia) that merged the Bolsa Escola with three other federal cash transfer programs. Additionally, These policies brought controversial results. While attendance rates of students between the ages of 7 and 14 continued to rise, grade repetition rates fell, and university enrollments doubled from 2002 and 2014, students’ performance on international exams did not improve. However, the situation may change during Lula’s present mandate. In contrast to his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro who massively cut research funds to public universities during his regime (2019-2022), Lula, has already made commitments to reverse this policy and endorse advancements in science and technology. Leveraging on the economic boom that characterized his first term as President, Lula has the necessary financial resources to fulfill his socialist objectives.

4. Conclusion: a glimpse to the future.

There are still a few initiatives that Brazil’s government could implement to improve the country’s education level. A first move could be torevert the spending on education to pre-Bolsonaro levels. Secondly, the government could provide performance-based incentives to families in the favelas, likemoney in the form of grants and scholarships to the best performing students. This would spur students into putting more effort into their studies and raise the education level of the population in these areas. In the long term, this will help favelas develop, increasing the average households income in these areas.