Instituto TIM – Agentes da Transformação

Action that enables young people from Rio de Janeiro communities to collect and generate quality data through field research

Proposal

In Rio de Janeiro (RJ), according to the 2010 IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) census, nearly 1.5 million people, or over 22% of the city’s population, live in slums. Recent and independent initiatives have made it possible to better understand who the inhabitants of the municipalities of Rio de Janeiro are and what they think, but the amount of high quality official data available, with a specific profile in the favelas and able as such to serve the contribution to public policy, is still insufficient.

About the initiative

In four years, the Agentes da Transformação project met the urgent need for quality information about residents of communities in Rio de Janeiro, especially those where the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) were located. In addition, it offered young people from these communities an alternative for professional qualification in field research.

Held in partnership with the Instituto Pereira Passos (IPP), an organ of the Rio de Janeiro City Hall, the initiative began with training in field research of public high school students who live in slums to be researched. After training, young people went to the streets of their communities to carry out a large household survey with statistical accuracy that could be used to track the socioeconomic profile of the youth in those communities. Each researcher interviewed 50 young people aged 14 to 24 and recorded the information on tablets, in the free software Para Pesquisa, developed by Instituto TIM. The project culminated in the graduation of these young researchers, carried out after the presentation of the results of the study, which were shared with public agencies, companies and third sector institutions. All UPP communities in Rio were surveyed by the project.