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Berkeley-UNIDO fellow studies role of computers in Brazil’s favelas
by Rachel Jackson
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A young visitor works on his computer skills at one of Brazil’s shared access centers in Rio de Janeiro, an ongoing project to teach computer skills to low-literacy children and adults.
RODRIGO FONSECA PHOTO
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In the recent acclaimed Brazilian film City of God, a boy named Rocket comes of age in Rio de Janeiro’s notorious urban slum, or favela, the Cidade de Deus housing project. Poverty, violence, and drug trafficking paralyze any sense of normal life, but Rocket escapes by learning photography and taking pictures for a local newspaper.
Some real-life Brazilians may be finding their own ticket out of poverty through computers. For the last 10 years, Brazil’s Committee for Democratizing Information Technology (CDI) has been operating computing centers where neighborhood residents can learn basic computer skills. The goal is to inspire children to stay in school and help adults get jobs.
Is the CDI program working? Rodrigo Fonseca, a CS graduate student and Brazilian native, wanted to find out. For three weeks last summer he traveled to Brazil’s inner cities with three other Berkeley graduate students: Joyojeet Pal from from City & Regional Planning and Manisha Shah and Claudio Ferraz from Agricultural & Resource Economics. They observed and interviewed users of the centers to evaluate their effectiveness and determine which skills are most easily learned and applied in the everyday lives of low-literacy adults and children.
“There was criticism in Brazil that these organizations should be spending money on food for the poor, not computers,” says Fonseca. “So we wanted to see if there was any measurable outcome.”
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Ph.D. candidate and Brazilian native Rodrigo Fonseca was one of 31 Berkeley-UNIDO fellows who traveled to developing countries last year, the inaugural year of the Bridging the Divide program. This year, 18 fellows have been selected to pursue research on information technology applications in Mali, China, India, Mexico, and Kenya.
RACHEL JACKSON PHOTO
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The team presented its findings at last month’s second annual Bridging the Divide conference, the research initiative jointly sponsored by the Management of Technology Program at Berkeley and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). Held on campus in April, the conference serves as a springboard for interdisciplinary teams that travel to developing countries to study application of information technology in solving large-scale problems like poverty and poor education.
When Fonseca’s team got to Brazil, he says, the researchers quickly discovered they had to assimilate and work within local customs.
“We couldn’t e-mail people and ask a couple questions. You have to be there, have a sip of coffee, and have dinner with them before you start to get information.”
After collecting and analyzing their data, they found that knowledge of some computer programs does help people search for jobs, interact with the community, and do schoolwork. Although unable to quantify the CDI program’s effect on these outcomes, the team did find success stories like Leandro Farias, a poor child who took classes at a CDI center and learned enough to work there. He stayed in school and was accepted into the university, where he’s now studying sociology and running a computing co-op that provides networking and computer services for poorer neighborhoods.
Fonseca plans to continue the research and keeps a hopeful final impression of his recent visit. “My favorite memory,” he says, “was seeing those kids using computers and talking about a future.”
Go to http://bridge.berkeley.edu for more details about the Berkeley–UNIDO project. |
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