That system known as System S is an initiative of the private sector but funded in large part by the federal government. The report demonstrates how hard it is for low-income youth to access the regular programs of System S. While the parts of System S designed for low-income youth are good in theory, in practice they are not extensive and even when they exist, still present barriers to would-be applicants. The report uses a variety of data including interviews with low-income youth in Rio.
Low-income youth in urban Brazil face many challenges moving to work in the main stream economy. These challenges include lack of qualifications, inappropriate qualifications, lack of family knowledge and connections to main stream jobs, color and gender, and physical separation in low-income communities from middle-income and downtown community job opportunities. But systems exist to train youth for work in Brazil, some of them aimed at all youth and some at low-income youth. This report raises the question of how well these systems serve low-income urban youth.
Since the 1940s, Brazil has had a system of vocational training funded by legally mandatory contributions from the private sector and run through a series of non-profit organizations known as Sistema S or the Service System. The S system is the training arm of the Confederation of Industry (CNI). It has nine separate services organized by type of training and sector. The S System interacts with government programs by means of the latter providing financial support for workforce development through the component parts of the S system for certain defined purposes. One of those purposes is helping poor and disadvantaged populations. Another government project to assist low-income youth find jobs is the Apprenticeship Law enacted in 2000 which requires medium and large firms to employ five percent of their workforce as apprentices with payment of at least the mandatory minimum wage and time for compulsory classroom training.
Young people who get accepted into and graduate from the low-income programs in System S and from the Apprenticeship Law programs praise them as being life changing. But many low-income young people find the programs hard to get into and hard to stay in for reasons including educational preparation, complex application processes, geographical inaccessibility, lack of self confidence and lack of support. Furthermore, a World Bank report finds an almost complete lack of useful monitoring of the programs making a true assessment of their worth and the development of an agenda for improving them impossible.
Photo by Marcelo Santos Braga.