The reducing harms to children 0-8 project advances.The goal of this project, funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation of the Netherlands, is to develop strategies to reduce harms, including violence, to young children who live in low-income urban communities in Brazil. The site of the work will be the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area and in the first year work will be concentrated in the large low-income community of Rocinha.

Survey: safe places for young children in the community

Several aspects of this three year effort are already underway. CIESPI staff is actively planning a survey of places young children attend outside of their homes in Rocinha with the goal of completing a census of such places which may be crèches, pre-schools, or other cultural, religious and educational sites. Once the census is completed, staff will select a small sample of sites to examine in detail the nature of the programs, the number of children who attend, and staff views on how the programs could be improved and possibly serve more children. Rocinha is a very crowded community with two very busy paved, major streets and many houses accessible only through alleys. Residents complain of the absence of safe places for children to be outside the home, and this part of the project addresses that issue.

Implementing policies for children 0 to 8 in Rio de Janeiro

For a number of years, CIESPI has convened a group of early childhood practitioners and experts to promote changes in municipal policies for young children. This work resulted in November 2013, in the passage by the Rio de Janeiro Children’s Rights Council (a federally mandated body for all municipalities to promulgate policies for children), of a policy for improving the lives of young children in the city. It was the intent of the CIESPI convened group to construct a policy of priorities, items that could be implemented in a reasonable period of time, rather than a massive comprehensive plan, and the policy reflects that intent. As part of the project, CIESPI staff is playing an active role in strategizing for the implementation of the policy.

Key indicators of the condition of children in Rio and urban Brazil

A third aspect of the project already underway is the development and dissemination of key indicators of the condition of children in Rio and urban Brazil. Clearly the use of such indicators is vital to successful policies but in Brazil, while such indicators have been collected for a long time, they have not, in practice, been available to the public. The national census bureau, the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE), has collected such data but not provided them to the interested public in a usable form. This situation changed in June, 2014, when the Department of Economics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in partnership with IBGE, developed software (Data Zoom) which could be used in conjunction with readily available commercial data software to access census data and yearly household sample data easily. CIESPI has entered into a contract with the Department of Economics to provide a series of data on children 0-8 and CIESPI will post these data on its website and use them as the empirical underpinning of the entire project.