CHILD
OF BRAZIL
This is a charity group
with the aim of preventing all forms of
child abuse to children and young people in Brazil, by supporting community
projects that work to relieve poverty and to protect children's rights. Our
aim is seeing a happy little face in every child that we help.
Brazil is the largest country in both South
America and the Latin
American region. It is the world's fifth largest country,
both by geographical
area
and by population.
It
is the largest Lusophone country in the world,
and the only one in the Americas. A Lusophone
is someone who speaks the Portuguese language
either as a native speaker, as an additional language, or as a learner.
Area: 8,515,767 km2 (27x UK:
315,093 km²)
Population: 201.032.714
(3x UK: 63,705,000)
Capital: Brasilia.
Largest city: São
Paulo.
In Brazil the incidence
of poverty is exceedingly high. In 2001, it was estimated that at least 48% of
Brazil’s population lived in poverty.
Brazil’s Northeast
region has the single largest concentration of rural poverty in Latin America.
In this region, 58% of the total population and 67% of the rural population
live below the poverty line.
According to UNICEF
statistics, about 42% of Brazilian children live in poverty. Also,
approximately 12% of all Brazilian children live on the streets. The causes of
child poverty in Brazil and across the globe are complex, and many researchers
have theorized about the international roots of this problem.
A charity idea: In
March 2013, as my mum was coming to visit me, I asked some friends to donate
unwanted clothes to children in Brazil. Our family there has contact with
children in need every day. They are everywhere really. Since then people ask
me if I still want clothes and maybe toys to send to Brazil, so I decided to
try and set up a charity.
The idea of helping
children in need is always in my heart, as I lived in a poor district of Belem
(Icoaraci) for 36 years. I have seen children and their parents in very
difficult situations, caused by a wide range of social and political problems.
Here are some of the problems many Brazilian children face every day:
Living
in "favelas" - slums.
Census data released in
December 2011 by the IBGE (Brazilian
Institute of Geography and Statistics) shows that in 2010,
about 6% of the population lived in slums
in Brazil. This means that 11.4 million of the 190 million people that lived in
the country resided in areas of irregular occupation definable by lack of
public services or urbanization, referred to by the IBGE as "subnormal
agglomerations".
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela)
The city of Belem in
North Brazil is in the first place on the national ranking of people living in
slums, 53,9% of its population. It is with community projects based there that we will work with.
Poor
health system
"Brazil has only 1.8
doctors per 1,000 people — not only fewer than in developed nations, but also a
smaller ratio than in neighbouring countries such as Argentina and Uruguay.
That led Brazil to appeal to doctors from Spain, Portugal, Argentina and other
places to come work here. Although hundreds have arrived in recent weeks, it is
far from enough".
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/brazil-facing-health-care-crisis-imports-cuban-doctors/2013/08/30/2f9c200e-102f-11e3-a2b3-5e107edf9897_story.html)
Poor
education system
Most primary schools are constitutionally
maintained either by municipalities or the states. Both entities are obliged to
apply at least 25% of their budgets in education. Since economic disparities
exist between states, richer states and cities have more money to deliver
quality education, whereas in the poorer cities and States the education
will be generally of lower standards.
School non-attendance by absence and malnutrition
is one of the biggest educational problems in Brazil. Work under
the age of 16 is forbidden by law, however Brazil has many cases of child
labour. Children from large poor families start working from the age of 10 in
order to help their parents, despite the law of compulsory education between
the ages of 10 and 14. Other reasons for school non-attendance are the lack of
sufficient school places and the high examination failure rate. Malnutrition
also materially affects the intellectual development of children,
giving them little chance of adapting to an educational environment.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_issues_in_Brazil)
I would like to illustrate this space with a
piece of information that I found in the following address: http://www.unicef.org/corporate_partners/files/Brazil_general_information.pdf
It tells us about education in North Brazil and,
as a teacher for 9 years in that region, I saw what is described here working
with ribeirinhos pupils in an island in the Amazon region called Cotijuba.
"Education is the
key to development. However, many children in the Brazilian state of Pará
either do not go to school or drop out.
The
inhabitants of the state of Pará have many different cultural backgrounds. A
large number of them live in remote places in the Amazon. Public education in
Brazil is not tailored to the way of life and the cultural diversity in the Amazon.
School books that use the big city as a frame of reference are not suitable for
children living in that area. In addition, there are not enough schools and
they are difficult to reach. Moreover, the quality of the education offered is poor
and parents often do not recognize the importance of schooling. They prefer
their children to help them at home. As a result, many children in Pará either
do not go to school at all or hardly so. And children who do go to school often
have an empty stomach, preventing them from paying attention in the classroom."
The 2014 protests in
Brazil
were public demonstrations
in several Brazilian cities in response to the 2014 FIFA World Cup
and other social issues. The protests were primarily concerned with
the spending of billions of reais
of public money on stadiums for the World Cup.
Prior to 2014, social
movements opposed to Brazil hosting the Cup garnered support during the FIFA Confederations Cup
in 2013. The Facebook
group Movimento Anti-Copa de Decoração de Ruas (Anti-Cup Movement for
the Decoration of the Streets) gained more than 15,000 Likes
in a little over a month.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_protests_in_Brazil)
No comments:
Post a Comment