The project is coordinated by professor Kay Tisdall at the the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and in Brazil by professor Irene Rizzini at CIESPI/PUC-Rio. The aim is to contribute to debates and actions about children and their families in two communities: Rocinha (Rio de Janeiro) and Jardim Catarina (São Gonçalo), both in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The focus is to develop partnerships to improve the state of Early Childhood Education.

In this third project bulletin we discuss the importance of early childhood education, the rights to early childhood education set out in Brazilian law and the major role creches and pre-schools play in children´s lives.

This report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is based on several pieces of research and responds to the UN Committee's call for research-based recommendations for children and youth in institutions. The report was co-authored with the Brazilian Beneficent Association of the Little Nazarene and the Association of Researchers and Trainers of Children and Youth (OPN and NECA).

While the whole world has suffered profound impacts from COVID-19, children and young people have suffered in particular ways. They possess fewer emotional tools for coping with such a massive upheaval. They have more difficulty in the rules of social distancing and coping with lockdowns. Recent studies show the consequences of absence from school, increases of domestic and sexual violence, separation from friends and sources of support as the pandemic also deepens social inequalities.

Concerned with these events, CIESPI presents this policy analysis which examines the actual consequences of the events surrounding COVID 19 which demand specific caring strategies for the young population bearing in mind the diverse social, economic and cultural contexts that Brazilian children inhabit.

The data described in the research report are part of a study called To Know is to Care, a partnership between the Beneficent Association of the Young Nazarene, a practice and policy nonprofit organization working in the northeast of Brazil to assist homeless youth return to family and community, and CIESPI at PUC-Rio.
The study includes a survey of youth on the streets and in institution care in the seventeen Brazilian cities with populations in excess of one million inhabitants. Data was collected from youth on the streets at different times during the day and from young people with a street history in institutions.

The project is coordinated by professor Kay Tisdall at the the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and in Brazil by professor Irene Rizzini at CIESPI/PUC-Rio. The aim is to contribute to debates and actions about children and their families in two communities: Rocinha (Rio de Janeiro) and Jardim Catarina (São Gonçalo), both in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The focus is to develop partnerships to improve the state of Early Childhood Education.

This first bulletin describes the results of our first consultations with the two communities in the project. We have addressed two topics: 1) the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) initiatives aimed at young children. Between September and December 2020, we consulted with people who work in these communities about the challenges of caring for and working with young children especially in these difficult times.

Listening to young people and promoting places for them to participate in key decisions on
their lives have long been central to CIESPI’s work. The publication takes these concerns
into the area of institutional care for adolescents

Conducted with CIESPI’s long term partner, the service organization the Beneficial Association of Sao Martinho, it is the third of the series of studies on the topic. The report analyses information from and about a group of young pregnant women or young mothers living either on the streets or in squats in the central district of the city of Rio de Janeiro served by Sao Martinho.

The project described in Research and Policy Bulletin 6 involved about 560 children between the ages of six months and thirteen years. In addition to drawing on the silhouettes, the children told stories and participated in exhibitions where their drawings and narratives were displayed. These productions were then discussed in meetings in which the children, school staff and researchers took part. The authors point out that the dialectical space provided by such interactions is guided by an ethical point of view which recognizes cultural and identity pluralities and contributes to the formation of people and creators in solidarity in their relationships to themselves, with others and the world. This point of view also demands that such understandings could and should inform policy debates and decisions about children and youth.

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 communities.