Our Youth and Their Training Program

A total of 50 young men and women ages 16 to 21 are participating in the pilot phase of Programa Para o Futuro. Thirty of the participants are young women and 20 are young men. All participating youth come from poor families living in the city of Recife, Brazil. All youth who have not yet graduated from high school are also attending public high schools in the city while working in our IT employability training program. These 50 youth were selected from a pool of more than 200 applicants (the number of applicants was limited by the selection process). You can learn more about our youth by exploring the following sections of the web site:
Please visit the Selection Criteria section to learn about the rigorous process and criteria that we used to select youth to participate in the training and internship program.
 
Explore the Youths' Personal Profiles to learn about each of our youth. Each student creates and maintains their own profile on-line as a way of learning to communicate well on the Internet and to gain valuable IT and web design skills.
 
Linked to the students' profiles are their on-line Project Portfolios. The Portfolio provides each youth with a place to present their learning projects that demonstrate the skills they are using and will be part of their on-line resume. By creating and maintaining their Project Portfolios, the youth learn and continuously practices a variety of technical skills while also exercising their creativity and gaining self-esteem by sharing their work with their peers and others on-line.
 
In addition to creating and maintaining their Profiles and Portfolios, the youth also create and maintain their Independent Web Sites. This part of the project allows youth to experiment with and learn to use different technologies, exercise their creativity, improve their communication skills and engage in self-managed continuous learning as they create their own web sites.
 
The On-line Journals help youth integrate the above features of the program with other learning activities, technical skill building work and the E-Mentoring program.
 
During their training, the youth will also use a variety of on-line learning resources that are part of the Project's web site including: the ICT FAQ, the ICT Glossary and the
Bank-of-Links
.
 

The Program Para o Futuro Project is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
and is conducted by the Academy for Educational Development (AED) and the dot-ORG program
under Cooperative Agreement No. 512-A-00-02-00017-00.