The voice of favelas: training and tools for storytellers

The 2002 film “City of God” showed the world an unfavorable picture of Brazil’s favelas: crowded, chaotic and burdened with substandard infrastructure. That image still holds true. However, in the last decade, the favelas have changed for the better, even as the demographics have become more complex.

An estimated 65 percent of the 12.38 million people living in more than 15 thousands favelas are now considered middle class, according to a survey developed by DataFavela, a Brazilian research institute focusing on low-income areas.

Around 74 percent of favelas inhabitants access the Internet at least once a week, and 75 percent of them have access through mobile devices. The survey has also revealed that around 92% of Internet users — or 8.4 million people — have a Facebook account.

Those statistics may surprise people who have never been in a favela, but they make for a more interesting reality today in Brazil’s low-income areas. The fact is that the Internet and new technologies have opened new horizons for people who have been ignored for a long time by both for the mainstream media and governments.

Inhabiting favelas nowadays are very tech-savvy millennials and adults who are not that familiar with technology. Both groups are eager to test and understand the power they have in their own hands. Leading these efforts are citizen and community journalism initiatives working to give greater voice to their communities and small-scale businesses that are seeking to use social media networks to promote their enterprises. With a little more guidance, these experiments will help muffled voices be heard and businesses succeed, and my goal with this Social Journalism project is to help them to do it with right tools.

Talking to people who live in low-income areas in Brazil, you can quickly understand that they don’t want anyone else narrating their stories. I conducted more than 30 interviews during this project and I also observed more than a hundred social media accounts. The demand is very clear and consistent: they want to represent themselves and tell their own stories.

Based on that claim I developed a partnership with Facebook Brazil in a series of workshops.

I am teaching citizens who live in low-income areas how to shoot and edit videos using smartphones and free apps, how to write a complete story based on the concept of the “lede” in journalism, and how to spread the word through social media, blogs or websites. I conducted the workshops at the "Facebook na Comunidade”, the Facebook Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab in Heliópolis, in São Paulo.

Since August I trained around 30 people between 18 and 60 years old. Most were interested in learning how to produce text, photos and videos to boost their small business through the Internet. The workshop group included people like Elza Maria Romualdo, 50, an artisan who produces loom rugs and after the workshop is selling 50% of her production through her Facebook page. And Joel Nogueira, 36 years old, a photographer and community journalist.

“I will use the things I learned in this workshop on my community reporting blog, and on my work as a photographer,” said Nogueira.

Through media skills training, I believe it is possible to empower people from low-income areas to tell their own stories.

“We have cases here of people who use what they have learned in your classes to produce texts, videos and photos. They use these tools to sell more, and from there we start seeing local development, people feel more empowered, ” says Tiago Costa, a Facebook multiplier.

“Sometimes people think that they need great equipment, a very expensive professional camera but with your very simple tips, people start to believe that with the smartphone they have they will be able to produce the content they need to communicate with their audience in an effective way,” he said.

In fact, the inequality produces huge gaps of opportunities and learning, but I strongly believe that the access to the Internet combined with mobile devices can reduce those disparities. Elza Maria is a real proof that the trainings can help them to produce content with the power and quality to reach more people, preserve stories and beliefs and — why not? — boost their local business.