Rio de Janeiro: H H Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the Founder and Chairperson of the Education Above All Foundation (the Foundation), yesterday visited two schools in the Rocinha district of Rio de Janeiro, which is the largest favela — or shantytown — in Brazil.
Sheikha Moza first spoke with teachers and pupils at the Francisco de Paulo Brito school, where she toured classrooms, the library and the computer room. The school is part of the Schools of Tomorrow Project supported by the Foundation’s Educate A Child (EAC) programme in Rio de Janeiro. Sheikha Moza also spoke with the school’s Director on how EAC support is benefiting the school.
EAC, a global programme launched last year by Sheikha Moza, aims to help the world’s hardest to reach out-of-school children (OOSC) to get a quality primary education, and is supporting two projects in Brazil: Schools of Tomorrow and Nation Wide Advocacy for the support of out of OOSC.
Schools of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro will map out of schoolchildren. It will create community task forces to enrol children in schools and student communication group for peer-to-peer advocacy for education. The project will also train school staff to enrol 21,000 children in schools over three years.
Rio’s favelas have traditionally lower education levels, rates of illiteracy, age-grade disparity, OOSC and higher dropout rates.
The Municipal Department of Education developed the Schools of Tomorrow Programme, and has made progress in reaching OOSC in the last three years.
The nationwide advocacy programme will be implemented through Todos Pela Educacao and will launch a targeted community and school mobilisation programme in poor areas of Rio and Sao Paulo.
It will also engage the government education department, municipalities and communities to develop sustainable solutions together to enrol out-of-school children.
Later, Sheikha Moza visited the Andre Urani school in the Rocinha district. This school is part of Project GENTE, a recent initiative taken by the Municipal Board of Education in Rio de Janeiro in partnership with Unesco to drastically improve some of the poorest performing schools in the favelas.
Sheikha Moza spoke to children and staff on the school’s innovative approach to teaching.
The GENTE project aims to transform educational facilities and approaches to learning by using today’s most up-to-date technology.
The curriculum is designed to stimulate student autonomy and classrooms are far from typical. Each student has his or her individual laptop with online lessons built in each week.
Online lessons are individualised to match the level of the student and pupils are evaluated at the end of each week.
After the visits, Sheikha Moza said: “It is truly inspiring to see the determination of these children to learn, and of their teachers and communities to provide them with quality primary schooling in Rocinha.
“Brazil has made great strides over recent years to provide the vast majority of its children with access to education.
The Educate A Child programme and Brazil are developing a flourishing partnership, where we can learn from Brazil’s successes and share best practices.” QNA
