Educating Brazilian Youths on the Influence of Public Budgets

The idea of the project is to strengthen the capacity of children and teenagers to secure their rights and monitor public policies that affect them. The main goals are to ensure that children and teenagers are involved in discussions on rights and citizenship and to observe how these factors relate to the public budget.

The project organized workshops based on the principles of popular and art education, in which participation is vital to developing new knowledge, awareness, and sensibility needed for social transformation. The workshops’ playful approach combine art and communication to introduce deeper concepts and discussions on human rights, budget formulation, budget monitoring, and democratic participation. During the communications workshop, boys and girls develop their capacity to understand the world and articulate their viewpoints in a critical and sensible way.

In addition to these school programs, teenagers are encouraged to attend political spaces where public budget debates take place, such as city councils and the federal legislature. They also are encouraged to join children and teenage advocacy networks. In a meeting to discuss the 2009 Federal District education budget with lawmakers and public managers, kids proposed a budget amendment for approximately one million dollars. The amendment was passed, and funds were allocated to build sports courts and renovate schools. The challenge now is to monitor the execution of the allocated resources.

Throughout the workshops, students are trained to become writers, photographers, and illustrators for a magazine they will publish that focuses on human rights and public budgets. The purpose of this magazine is to broaden the debate and deepen the reflection on issues that emerged during the workshops. It also seeks to provide a forum for reaching consensus on the agendas for influencing public policies and budgets geared toward education and youth in the Federal District. The first issue of the magazine will go out in November.

The enthusiasm shown by all the participating schools confirms that building a culture of human rights is viable and necessary. Young participants developed a strong motivation for collective causes. In a time when the level of violence in Federal District schools is increasing, schools included in this project are headed in the opposite direction, becoming spaces for political and social commitment, creativity, affection, and solidarity.

During the last five years, INESC has developed a methodology for promoting access to human rights and incorporating them concretely in public policies and the allocation of public resources. Doing this successfully requires agility to be able to work with the government at national, state, and municipal levels, particularly with the National Congress, as well as to network with social movements, NGOs, grassroots leaders, schools, and youth organizations to discuss and disseminate the link between rights and budgets.

Part of INESC’s institutional mission is to understand the budget cycle and the tax system (public revenues and spending) to influence policy design and the allocation and execution of public funds that benefit the poor and marginalized. Although this mission statement is tangible in different geographical and institutional spaces, the work with the Federal District schools has shown an effective impact on citizenship awareness and the great transformational potential in youth education to understand, monitor, and influence public budgets.

For more information, contact Alexandre Ciconello at ciconello@inesc.org.br, Márcia Acioli at marcia@inesc.org.br and Lucídio Bicalho Barbosa at lucidio@inesc.org.br.

This article is published at IBP Newsletter