CAMPINAS, Brazil – Brazil’s public school system is notoriously awful and so poor students struggle to pass the entrance exams into the country’s top universities. That means that most of those winning places at the best, tuition-free institutions are from the country’s moneyed elite.

Marcelo Knobel, Founder of Profis

One teacher at Unicamp, the highly rated state university in Campinas, 100 km from Sao Paulo, could see that high school talent was going to waste. So Marcelo Knobel decided to create a scheme to give promising students a way into his university.

The Interdisciplinary Higher Education Program, or Profis for short, offers the best students at Campinas’s 96 high schools entry into a two-year liberal arts preparatory course. If they pass they get a guaranteed place on a degree course.

“We get the best from each school,” Knobel said. “They know that they are getting the chance of a lifetime and they know to take it.”

Brazil is one of the most unequal societies in the world, particularly when it comes to education. Some 85 percent of those who finish public high school here in Sao Paulo state, Brazil’s richest and most populous, attend private schools. More than half the public high schools in the Campinas region do not send even one student to Unicamp. And although around half of Brazilians consider themselves black or dark-skinned, just 14 percent of students at the university are mixed race.

Those who make it onto the Profis course have a different profile. Forty percent are black or dark-skinned. Eighty per cent come from families who earn less than the minimum wage. And 86 percent are the first person in their family ever to attend university.

The program has only just admitted its second year of students and teachers already admit the challenges are huge. Students admit struggling with the step up. Some are unprepared for the increase in workload. A few believe the other students look down on them. Course coordinators says that only half the group is likely to pass the course in the allotted time and that many will have to do a third year.

Knobel said that because many kids come from disadvantaged backgrounds it is important to especially important to help them both on and off the campus.

The poorest 60 % of students get a monthly stipend equivalent to the minimum wage, which is important to poor families who might prefer their children to work rather than study. They also get medical support, teachers assistants, food and transport. And when students falter, professors do all they can to bring them back into the fold.

Education experts have lauded the program as a clever way of improving social inclusion. Although many of Brazil’s public universities have some kind of quota system in place, either for Afro-descendents or for the disadvantaged, Profis is so far unique.

Knobel hopes it can emerge as an example to others.

“I think this can be reproduced at any university,” he said. “It is not expensive. If Unesp does it and if USP does it and Unicamp does it then we’ll get 5 % of students involved and then it can start to be relevant.”

Andrew Downie fled a factory job in Scotland almost 20 years ago and set off to find adventure in Latin America. Since then he has lived in Mexico, Haiti, and now Brazil, writing and reporting for publications such as The New York Times, Time magazine, Esquire and GQ. He spent eight years in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives in São Paulo.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

Brazil is already a world leader in renewable energy but it is only now that wind power is starting to take off and attract some of the attention given to the country’s much copied biofuels sector.

Brazil currently has around 1,500 Megawatts of wind power capacity installed and working but that number should rise to 8,000 Megawatts by 2016 and 20,000 megawatts in 2020, according to Pedro Perrelli, executive director of the Brazilian Wind Power Association.

Several big companies are investing heavily here and that investment could make Brazil the fourth biggest installer of wind power in the world this year. Global firms like Alstom, Fuhrlander AG, Wobben, WEG, Insa, Suzlon, and GE are all looking to Brazil and particularly the country’s Northeast, where there are strong winds, few storms, and plenty of uninhabited land.

Those areas are also close to the electricity grid, which reduces transmission costs, and they are located near to the country’s fastest growing region.

“(Some) of the greatest potential is in the Northeastern region,”
Marcos Costa, Vice President Renewable Power and Thermal Power for Alstom Latin America, said last year on opening a wind turbine plant in Bahia state.

With over 1000 rivers and the largest supply of fresh water in the world, Brazil has historically got much of its power from hydro sources. Today, more than 80 % percent of the energy matrix comes from hydro power.

But experts see wind power as an antidote to that strategy. They believe relying on hydro is risky because of possible droughts, as the country discovered in 2001 when widespread electricity rationing and rolling blackouts were introduced all over the country.

“In a country mainly powered by hydro energy and increasingly suffering from water shortages, wind power can, help alleviate some serious energy security concerns, especially during the dry winters,”the Global Wind Energy Council said in a recent report.

Brazil has untapped riches in wind, with a potential of around 143 Gigawatts at 50 meters and as much as 350 Gigawatts at 80-100 meters, according to the council.

“Just two years ago wind power was 0.4 percent of the matrix and today it is 1.5 per cent,” said Perrelli. “It should be 12-15 per cent of the matrix in 2020.”

The government wants renewable energies to account for 10 % of the country’s electricity supply by 2020 and authorities offer assistance to wind power projects under the Proinfa program for renewable energies.

Some 95 % of Brazil’s wind farms were built with assistance from Proinfa.

About the Author

Andrew Downie fled a factory job in Scotland almost 20 years ago and set off to find adventure in Latin America. Since then he has lived in Mexico, Haiti, and now Brazil, writing and reporting for publications such as The New York Times, Time magazine, Esquire and GQ.  He spent eight years in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives in São Paulo.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

Conor Bohan formed lifelong links with Haiti thanks to a girl who was so poor she couldn’t afford to pay for secretarial school.

Conor Bohan, founder of HELP, the Haitian Education and Leadership Program.

The girl, a former student of Bohan’s at the Port-au-Prince high school where he taught English, asked for a loan so she could continue studying. Bohan said no. He thought she was too smart to just type and asked her what she really wanted to do. When she said she dreamed of being a doctor Bohan offered her a deal. Do well at university, he said, and I’ll keep paying your expenses.

It all boiled down to simple arithmetic, said Bohan, 43. For around $100 he could send a potentially brilliant student to university.

“There is this mass of people who graduate at secondary schools but don’t have the money even to take the bus to university,” Bohan said. “And you can overcome that at the fraction of the cost it would take to educate them at a US university.”

Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, where 72 % struggle by on $2 a day and where more than one-in-three people cannot read and write. Only around 1 % of those eligible for college make it in, Bohan said. Of those who do, less than half graduate.

Bohan’s eureka moment – the one that led him to create a formal aid network – came when one kid threatened to drop out of college to take a job working in a shop. Bohan and his friend agree to front him the $330 a year he needed, as long as he got good grades. The kid stayed in school and graduated with honours. His first job as an accountant came with a starting salary of $6,000.

“We spent $660 over two years to help him get his degree and after he got it he earned a starting salary of $6,000,” Bohan said.

“So that was the difference between him getting $6,000 or dropping out and earning $100 a month as a clerk in a hardware store. At that moment I realized that this could grow.”

Bohan, now 43, enlisted friends and family and together they started paying to put promising high school students through university. In 2003 he secured institutional funding and created the Haitian Education and Leadership Program, or HELP.

Today, HELP gives scholarships to 125 youngsters from all Haiti’s 10 departments, or states. The scholarships are so popular that HELP recently had to rewrite its rules to allow only straight A students to apply.

The successful students get a scholarship to come to the top universities in Port-au-Prince and are put up in three dorm houses run by US students who work for HELP. There they get English lessons, computer courses and academic advice.

The successful students are responsible for spreading the word in their home towns and last year spoke to around 140,000 people about the scholarships available. There were 330 candidates for just 30 spots.

It costs HELP around $8,500 per student per year and the overall budget has soared to $1 million , much of it coming from foundations run by Mastercard, George Souros, a group of Lutheran churches and the US embassy.

And that girl Bohan helped out all those years ago? She’s now a doctor.

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About the Author

Andrew Downie fled a factory job in Scotland almost 20 years ago and set off to find adventure in Latin America. Since then he has lived in Mexico, Haiti, and now Brazil, writing and reporting for publications such as The New York Times, Time magazine, Esquire and GQ.  He spent eight years in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives in São Paulo.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

Valdenor Freitas came to Sao Paulo 20 years ago to seek his fortune but like many youngsters new to a metropolis he found himself cold and hungry in a run down neighbourhood on the edge of town, with no running water, no electricity and no public transport.

Things were such that when his wife arrived to join him after a 3000-km bus ride from their home in Fortaleza, she took one look and said: “God help me, I’m not living here.” “You had to walk through an open sewer to get here,” she recalled. “When it rained the mud came up to my shins.”

Today, the couple live in their own home, a humble but spacious dwelling that sits above the café-bar they own and run. The street below isn’t paved but the sewer is gone, there is regular electricity and a local bus passes right in front. Across the road is the new supermarket Freitas opened last month.

Life has improved markedly for Freitas and many other Brazilians over the last decade. More than 30 million people were lifted from poverty into the so-called middle class, thanks to generous social assistance programs, minimum wages increases that outpaced inflation, and a consistently growing economy.

But a more specific reason for Freitas’ gains is credit. Brazil’s banks survived the economic crisis unscathed and as standards of living rose they freed up credit. Freitas benefited from loans from Santander. Since 2006, the amount of money Santander has given away in small loans has gone from just 22 million reais to almost 300 million reais.

Freitas used his first loan of 1000 reais in 2008 to buy a freezer for ice cream and cachaça cane liquor for his bar (because it has the biggest mark up). After paying that loan off, he got another and then another and another and today he owes Santander’s micro-credit unit 20,000 reais.

But although the bank’s interest rates are abusive by Western standards – Brazil has the highest interest rates in the world – he has so far managed to pay off his loans. Without them, Freitas couldn’t have reformed his bar, installed a pool table and plasma TV, or opened his new mini-market.

“The loans gave me more stability,” he said. “You have to invest to advance. Money generates money.”

Brazilian commerce already works on a de facto credit system with most consumer goods paid for in monthly installments. The newly available credit means that big ticket items like cars and houses are now available to citizens who couldn’t have imagined owning them a decade ago.

“Poor people have in their houses the same things that rich people have in theirs,” Freitas said. “I never dreamt of having a car, it was so difficult to even think of that happening. I struggled just to pay my rent. But over the last few years all sorts of doors have opened.”

Brazil’s economy is slowing and inflation is rising but annual growth this year is still forecast to be twice that in Europe or the US. With small loans now readily available, even people like Freitas can share in the bonanza.

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About the Author:

Andrew Downie fled a factory job in Scotland almost 20 years ago and set off to find adventure in Latin America. Since then he has lived in Mexico, Haiti, and now Brazil, writing and reporting for publications such as The New York Times, Time magazine, Esquire and GQ.  He spent eight years in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives in São Paulo.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

MANACAPURU, Brazil – The mere mention of the word Amazon conjures images not just of the world’s biggest jungle, but also of enormity.

Amazonian is a synonym for huge, remote, overwhelming.

Just getting there is a journey. A flight from São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro to Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, takes almost four hours, or about the same as it takes to go from London to Moscow.

A trip into the state’s interior is even more fantastic. Some villages are four weeks from Manaus by boat, along some of the state’s more than 1000 rivers.

One of the problems for the Amazonas school system is finding qualified high school teachers in those small towns. Another is that pupils often have to travel great distances to get to class. Some are forced to come to Manaus if they want a high school education; others give up, defeated by the hassle or the cost.

A distance learning program aims to overcome some of those geographically imposed hurdles by using technology to beam lessons into the farthest schools. The program that started in 300 classrooms in 2007 is now present in 1300.

“What we do is offer the structure for people to study every day,” said Jose Augusto de Melo Neto, the program’s director. “We install a satellite dish, a generator, a television, computers, microphones and webcams and whatever else is needed for a school to connect with our studio.”

Teachers in Manaus give lessons in front of a camera and the pictures are sent to the remote classrooms. A local teacher is on hand to help students, who can also communicate with the specialist teacher via web cam and through a chat function.

The program has been a resounding success, according to Melo Neto’s numbers. Some 14 % percent of Brazil’s high school students fail to complete their second year. For those using the distance learning course it is less than 3 %. In Amazonas, 89 % of students taking distance learning courses graduate high school, compared to just 75 % in Brazil as a whole.

Melo Neto hopes to expand the program to reach 75,000 students by 2104, or half of the state’s rural children. Two other Brazilian states have already adopted the technology, and others are looking into it. The program recently won a World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) award from the Qatar Foundation’s global education organization.

However, there are downsides. While educators in Manaus love the program, the target audience is not so keen.

“It’s harder to resolve your doubts,” said Ana Caroline Souza, a 17-year old math student. “You can’t go back over things. I don’t see the advantage in it.”

The advantage is in the success rate and also in the convenience.

Many remote students have to abandon their studies when they finish primary school because there are no high schools nearby. So though they may not like the satellite dish and the screen, it is the only alternative.

“If we didn’t have it,” said Souza, “we wouldn’t be here.”

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About the Author:

Andrew Downie fled a factory job in Scotland almost 20 years ago and set off to find adventure in Latin America. Since then he has lived in Mexico, Haiti, and now Brazil, writing and reporting for publications such as The New York Times, Time magazine, Esquire and GQ.  He spent eight years in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives in São Paulo.

Just days after her company set up the first large-scale recycling project in a Rio de Janeiro shantytown, Fernanda Mayrink saw a young man hand over two bags of garbage at the collection point. It was all she could do not to grab him and give him a big hug.

“I was so excited at seeing him dropping off garbage on his way to work that I said out loud, ‘What a great sight!’” recalled Mayrink, community outreach officer for Light, Rio’s electricity company. “He heard me and he laughed.”

“Seeing him was symbolic, you could see that the project is taking off and that people are getting into the habit of recycling their refuse. It took him two minutes on his way to work. What we want is for that to become a habit.”

When it comes to recycling, Brazil is among the world’s leaders (first in aluminium, second in plastic bottles, third in steel cans and fourth in the reuse of solid plastics) but most of that is down to individuals rather than organised schemes.

The Light project that kicked off last month in one of Rio’s best-known shantytowns, or favelas, aims to change that. Taking its lead from a hugely successful project run by an electricity firm in the north of the country, Light is offering clients money off their bills in return for household garbage like paper, metals, plastics, tetrapak, glass and cooking oil.

The project began in Santa Marta, one of Rio’s most iconic favelas. (Michael Jackson shot the video for They Don’t Care About Us here in 1996). Until recently controlled by heavily armed drug gangs, Santa Marta is one of the 68 favelas ‘pacified’ by Brazilian police aiming to transform the city ahead of the 2014 World Cup Final and 2016 Olympics, both of which will be held in the so-called Marvelous City.

Police entered the favela in 2008 and expelled the traffickers and the 6,000 residents now live in relative peace under the command of community police officers. One thing, however, hasn’t changed.

“You don’t see drugs and guns any more but you do see lots of rubbish,” said Mayrink, Light’s community outreach officer. “This project encourages recycling within the company’s concession area and at the same time contributes to sustainable development and the consumer’s pocket. Light wins, the customer wins (and) the environment wins.”

Many of Light’s clients in Rio’s pacified favelas have, in one obvious way, already won. Not only can they come and go without fear of being struck down in one of the regular shootouts, they also have a proper electricity supply for the first time in years.

Before, many residents took pirated electricity for free from atop nearby poles. Outages and spikes were common and gangs wielding machine guns made it impossible for Light’s technicians to carry out maintenance.

Since the favelas were pacified, Light has rewired homes, swapped old bulbs for electricity saving fluorescent ones, and bought new refrigerators to replace the ones that guzzled energy.

It has also brought together the residents of the favela and those living on the streets below. Those residing near the shanty are encouraged to bring their garbage into the favela’s two collection points. They can opt to take the refund themselves or donate the credits to a local charity.

“The idea is to unite the community and the people living around it,” Mayrink said.

Mayrink hopes the new project will expand into potentially hundreds of others if it takes off but for now she is content to oversee the transformation in Santa Marta.

“I love this idea,” she said with a contagious smile. “There’s no chance that this won’t be a success.”

Do you think an initiative like the Light Project could be implemented in India? What kind of incentives can be provided to curb the amount of garbage polluting our country? How can both the private and public sectors work together achieve this?

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About the Author:

Andrew Downie fled a factory job in Scotland almost 20 years ago and set off to find adventure in Latin America. Since then he has lived in Mexico, Haiti, and now Brazil, writing and reporting for publications such as The New York Times, Time magazine, Esquire and GQ.  He spent eight years in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives in São Paulo.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.