Description

Like millions of marginalised urban youth around the world, many young people in Rio de Janeiro’s sprawling favelas1 experience denial of their rights to basic social entitlements. This contributes to high levels of economic and social inequality in their neighbourhoods. In the favelas, few economic opportunities exist for young people. Many become caught up in drug addiction, violence or crime, often joining gangs. Faced with these deeply intractable problems, young people can feel trapped and powerless. Even adults in their own communities are distrustful of the younger generation and ambivalent about their ability to change things for the better.

Social change to address this situation is badly needed, so that youth – and the marginalised communities they often live in – can realise legitimate aspirations and human rights. But how can increased human rights impact youth living in favelas? And how will this be achieved? After all, human rights typically depend on functioning justice systems. Yet in Brazil, levels of police corruption are high, and the courts remain mostly inaccessible.

Young people, however, are a growing political force in Brazil and the youth vote is increasing. Since the 1960s, young people have increasingly become key leaders in Brazil’s social, political and environmental movements. Many young people think critically about the problems facing them, and use varied and sometimes innovative cultural forms, aided by new communications technologies, to press for societal change.

World Vision Australia became interested in an innovative approach to citizen advocacy that was pioneered successfully in Africa, known as Community Based Performance Monitoring (CBPM). This approach provides a means to empower communities to hold government decision makers accountable for the ways they provide services.

World Vision Brazil accepted World Vision Australia’s offer to provide CBPM training to its staff. At the training workshop, however, there was some controversy. Some of the Brazilian staff expressed strong scepticism about CBPM. They had many questions: Was it applicable in the Brazilian context? Was the training approach, whereby the CBPM methodology was first demonstrated as a package by trainers and then immediately applied in a local community, valid and appropriate? They engaged in a vigorous debate with the trainers. Some proposed that the planned field application of CBPM should be postponed to provide an opportunity for “contextualisation” of the approach and revision of the training methodology. In a specially-convened meeting, a consensus was achieved to proceed with the planned activity to allow World Vision Brazil’s staff to immediately apply their learning about CBPM practice.

As part of the workshop they tested CBPM with marginalised communities living on the fringes of Fortaleza, a large city in northeast Brazil. The results were quite dramatic.

Within a few weeks adults and youth were able to use the model to make progress on reforming local health services. In due course it helped a wider group of communities engage in participatory budgeting, with encouraging results. World Vision Brazil has further adapted and strengthened its practice to suit Brazilian political culture, history and diverse settings and re-named it Citizen Voice and Action (CV&A).

World Vision Brazil decided to apply CV&A to its work among marginalised urban young people aged 16-24. It began to implement the project in 2008 in three favelas in which World Vision Brazil was already working in Rio de Janeiro. This work – known as Youth Monitoring Public Policies (YMPP [MJPOP]) – sought to create opportunities for young people to build their capabilities to reform local essential services, and thus claim human rights. This is far from an automatic or straightforward process. It depends heavily on building citizenship and awareness of public policies at community level, fostering awareness about human rights among youth, and encouraging them to exercise their political voice, while increasing credibility with their local communities. World Vision Brazil calls the set of formative educational processes which prepare youth for civic engagement, “socio-political formation”.

REALISING HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE FAVELAS

During 2008-2009, water and garbage collection emerged as the two major issues of concern for local favela communities. Socio-political formation allowed the local youth to find out why water and sanitation were such pressing issues in their favelas. They found that some dwellings, particularly those higher up in their favelas, were not receiving publicly-distributed water despite having a right to do so. Although their municipality had a program to fund the building of two water reservoirs for the favelas, which would have significantly improved water supply, neither of these reservoirs had been built. So why had this program failed? Where had the money gone?

Meetings were again convened for favela dwellers at which community members agreed to take action to make the municipal government accountable for its obligation to provide water for all dwellings in the favela. Attendees decided to collect signatures from their communities, calling for government to implement the water program, and thus help to meet its human rights obligations. However, before collecting the signatures, youth leaders started a public awareness campaign about water. They staged a public event for the community, displaying placards to promote the benefits of clean water. Through this event, the youth leaders developed relationships with local children. Now, these children look to them as mentors, while the youth leaders actively involve children in community discussions.

The youth activists began collecting signatures to lobby for the community’s water rights. But the local community didn’t know who they were. Because it was an election year, community members mistakenly thought they were working for local politicians! To avoid getting caught up with local political campaigning, the youth leaders found another organisation willing to collect the signatures, and moved their focus to another burning issue.

This time they addressed garbage collection. They drew on their own growing understanding and experiences of socio-political formation, including examining budget allocation for sanitation programs. Further, they reflected on the challenges they were facing and appraised their strengths and weaknesses. This led them to focus on a different favela where the garbage problems were extremely bad. Drawing on their previous experience, the solution they found was to access a separate municipal fund available to favelas to address this issue. The youth activists started to promote discussion about garbage and sanitation policy. They researched public information about these policies, including the budget allocated for them. Next they started raising community awareness about the issue. This included awareness of reasons why garbage would pile up uncollected and smelly, posing health problems for the whole community.

They discovered that the community had misconceptions about the purpose of the favela garbage program. The community had accepted that they would have to live with pests and insects that transmit diseases because they thought the garbage problem could only be solved when another municipal program was implemented. To address this situation, the youth activists began to provide information to the community about the program, so now they know what it is for. This government program already has funding for garbage collection in 35 communities in Rio. The first thing youth leaders plan to do is to mobilise the community to claim their entitlement to services the program provides. The next step is to help community members understand how the program is supposed to be implemented. One of the eligibility conditions for this program is to have a well-organised association – a strong one! So a key activity youth are going to work on is mobilising the community to form such an association or to strengthen a suitable existing one.

The youth leaders have also had to face periodic disappointments while working to change public policies. After three months of research, chasing up information about the community and their right to the favela program, they organised a meeting and invited people from all three favelas to attend. Although they informed the participants about problems they had discovered, the turnout was disappointing. Attendance by community leaders was particularly poor, because another community event being held the same day proved much more attractive than talking about public policy. Failing to achieve their objective of developing a plan of action for implementing the program was a real set back. They learnt that in future they would need to be more careful in selecting the right day for public meetings, and to work harder at mobilising the community to attend.

WHAT DIFFERENCE IS YMPP MAKING?

In 2009, I interviewed a group of YMPP youth leaders from the three Rio favelas. I asked what had changed in their lives and their communities as a result of YMPP; what they had been learning in the process; and about rights-based relationships between governments, local officials and citizens. The most significant changes were that youth had become friends with their communities, and had built friendships among themselves. They had now begun to see government policies afresh, and become able to think critically about them. Surprising new political capacities had emerged among their leadership, gaining them respect and the ear of local politicians. Many youth leaders had become mentors of children in their early teens, in local advocacy. In addition, the youth leaders have gained fresh, practical understanding of their human rights and how to achieve them.

After about two years of YMPP, it is too early to assess what its lasting impact will be. In the short to medium term it appears that youth-led processes could contribute to specific tangible outcomes in the community, such as the building of water reservoirs. Longer term, realising rights through citizen advocacy from below – as is happening in Rio – involves much more. It requires hard work to build community, persistence in pressing for reforms, changes in policy and budget transparency, and the ability to cope with periodic discouragements and setbacks of many kinds.

Questions remain about sustaining the progress achieved by the youth activists, especially because favela youth populations are mobile. Youth are naturally eager to take up scarce opportunities for paid work, which reduces the time available to be engaged in their community. Over time, there is a real risk that YMPP could lose momentum. Yet even if it did so, it could still leave a valuable legacy, an increased level of political awareness and engagement in the favelas.

One possible avenue for sustaining change lies in the strong relationships youth leaders have developed with each other, and with other youth in solidarity elsewhere in Brazil. By mentoring and tutoring children from their favelas in YMPP, they may have created the basis for intergenerational change while also earning the respect of adults in their community. How well they “pass the baton” of working for human rights on to future generations is yet to be seen. When World Vision winds up the project, can such processes of wider socio-political formation be sustained? This momentum still partly depends on World Vision and local partners as external catalysts, but there are some signs it is gaining a life of its own. However, it will be important to assess the ongoing sources of, and resources for, sustaining change when evaluating the YMPP project.

Experience from elsewhere, including in other parts of Brazil, suggests that supportive local organisations will play an important role in sustaining the momentum for change. Further, wider evidence suggests that the responsiveness of governments in meeting their obligations and genuinely listening to community concerns will be a major influence in encouraging ongoing processes of change. This responsiveness is likely to wax and wane as various politicians and political parties hold power. However, the well-established Brazilian traditions of vibrant political activism and commitment to popular civic education are likely to leave some form of political activism as their legacy.

Human rights are founded on the dignity and worth of all human beings, and thus on the respect owed to them. Despite struggles and setbacks it seems that YMPP has managed to foster a sense of self-worth and self-esteem among youth. It has also deepened respect from adults towards them for the practical roles they are playing in bringing desired social change into the community. By expressing the common human dignity of all community members, communities in three previously unconnected favelas have become united.

Whether YMPP can be built on this foundation is likely to depend on a second fundamental feature of human rights which the youths’ experience amply demonstrates – human relationships which embody and seek justice for and within the community. It was surprising to them to find that friendship – both with each other, with their communities and with children – was so significant. But not so surprising when I reflected on how important strong human relationships are to human rights. It appeared that their friendships with their communities energised them. The sceptic may ask – can this last? Perhaps it will not last. Youth also recognised the importance of their relationships with politicians, but showed a healthy distance from their agendas and an ability to be quite critical of politicians’ ignorance about key policies.

This case shows that claiming human rights also entails political empowerment of those whose human rights are affected. This empowerment is not party-political, as the youth showed by deliberately avoiding it. For some adults, jaded by cynical party politics, this may seem refreshing. Whereas for others, more hard-headed perhaps, it may be thought naive.

Lastly, young people, with the help of socio-political formation seem to have grasped that human rights is about changing social and political systems and structures to make them more just. That involves very practical, even mundane issues including: engaging with budgets, policies and technical issues for essential services whose design and delivery– however boring – is the stuff of practising justice and realising human rights.

For the youth involved with YMPP, human rights have ceased to be remote or conceptual, but instead have become practical and relevant to local issues of concern to them and their community. For World Vision Brazil, YMPP has provided an opportunity to see what it means for youth to engage in a form of rights-based practice where they become the central actors.

By Bill Walker

1 Favela is Brazilian Portuguese for slum. It refers to shanty towns in Brazil. Many favela localities in Rio include steep hillsides, because the land is more unstable for dwellings and access.