In his words|Rodrigo Baggio
Rodrigo Baggio, the founder of CDI has won many accolades and worldwide recognition for his work that uses the potential of ICT for upliftment of poor community in Brazil. To mention a few, he has been a fellow member of the Ashoka Social Entrepreneurs in 1997; was appointed one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland in 2001; winner of the Tech Museum award 2004 in the Equity category, which is the largest in Silicon Valley and acknowledges the best technology projects for the benefit of humanity. He speaks about the CDI initiative. Excerpts:
On the origin of CDI Actually when I was twelve years, I found my two big passions in life. All during my adolescence, I continued to work as a volunteer with social movements and also continued to work with technology. But also, in college I made a decision to make a link between technology and my social sides. After college I began to work in international companies like Accenture and IBM. And after IBM, I started my own company and I began to focus 100%, 200% in my company and I didn’t have time to work as a volunteer. And I was not happy with this situation. 1993 was a very important year in my life because in this year, I asked myself about my future, about what I would like to be in 10 years. But I didn’t know February 2005 | www.i4donline.net
how or in what kind of social work I would like to start. In 1993 during a night, I had a dream and in my dream I saw poor young people using computers and having discusssions about their reality and about solutions to their problems through computers. And the next day when I woke up, I was so excited about this dream that I decided to change this dream into reality. I know I’m not Martin Luther King, but I had my own dream and I believed in this dream. My first step was that I created a computer donation campaign in Latin America and through this campaign I realised that poor young people love the idea of using a computer, but they don’t know how to use one. When I started this computer donation campaign, I began to donate computers to low-income communities. After 6 months of doing this campaign, I realised that if we teach about technology, they leverage the use of technology better. So in July of 1994 I had the idea to start a school for information technology and citizens’ rights inside a community in Rio de Janeiro. So when I had this idea, I began to talk with many people about this idea. And 99% precent of these people (my friends, my family, businessmen) said, ‘Rodrigo, you are crazy because poor people have the minds of poor people and they will never understand how to use technology.’ And they also said that poor people need food, not technology.
On CDI’s bridging the digital divide In Brazil, we have about 14% of the population using computers and about 1011% of the population connecting to the Internet. So, we have in Brazil a real “digital apartheid”. So many people are excluded from the technology. And the CDI’s way to combat this reality is that we create digital schools in partnership with community-base organisations. For us it is important not only to teach technology but to use technology to change the reality of these low income communities. Our pedagogical proposal is very important to us. It is based on awareness learning, having in mind social transformation. Our students will talk about the reality of their communities while learning about technology. That means technology for us is a tool; it’s not the end. And they build a social project and this project will have an impact in their communities and by doing this project, they will learn about technology. So, through these citizens and information technology schools, we are including these poor young people in the new society.
On the future of CDI We have built our management informational systems, database, and Internet. And now we have information for all of our schools in all of our states and countries. And we apply many processes to guarantee quality in our network. So, continuous work with quality is very important to us. Today we have 946 information technology and citizen rights schools working in 20 Brazilian states and in 10 countries. And our focus is more with low-income communities, but we have many special projects in special schools for indigenous people, for blind and poor, mentally disabled, physically disabled, and street kids, senior citizens. So we work with many different groups, but our focus is still young, poor people in low-income communities. Nearly 700,000 people have taken part in the training programs. To start new partnerships and work with new companies is very strategic for us. We believe a lot in partnership. So, to work with more companies gives the possibility to learn more with these companies and aggregate value in our work.
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