Young people in Northeast Brazil are committing themselves to peaceful coexistence in their region with the help of a specifically developed app, Nestante, through which they can share problems and creative solutions.
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Brazil was struggling with an extremely tense political, social, and economic situation. Those living in rural areas, such as the state of Piauí, have been overlooked by public policy for years and have poor access to education and health care. Jobs in the formal sector are scarce and income is low. With a lack of prospects, many young people fall into a life of crime and drug addiction.
To counteract this trend, Brücke · Le pont is committing itself to providing vocational training and promoting labor-market integration, as well as to improving the framework conditions for decent work.
Social communication as an opportunity
Working together with its partner organization Instituto Comradio, Brücke · Le pont is supporting a project in Piauí to train disadvantaged young people in social communication. The focus is on offering young people career prospects in the emerging communications sector while at the same time raising their awareness of social, political, and environmental issues. This education should allow them to play an active role in their community and commit themselves to local development and peaceful coexistence.
An app honored by the UN
The project survives on the networking of young people with like-minded people. In 2018, the Instituto Comradio developed the Nestante app for this purpose. Young people can use this app to publish messages, photos, short update videos, or problems from their communities. The information can be filtered by place and topic, meaning young people with the same concerns or from the same region can talk, develop solutions together, and share good practices. The platform is managed by voluntary project alumni, who check and approve the uploaded material. They also use the information as a basis for reports and interviews that they broadcast to society through local media. In 2019, Nestante was awarded an Innovation Prize by the United Nations Development Program in Brazil.
Focus on human communication
The app is widely used and, for Jessé Barbosa, President of Instituto Comradio, is an important source of information on the needs of the young people in the region and on what is happening in their communities. For him, technology is a means to an end: “Even though we use the Internet as the tool, the focus is on human communication. The project requires the active participation of young people – after all, the change we want to foster is implemented in real and not virtual life. The Internet is useful, but not indispensable.”
