Recode

The Elevate Prize, is one of the most prestigious awards in the social entrepreneurship area, also a unique opportunity to enhance the impact of organizations that aim for systemic change in society.

The Prize will support us to grow towards our long-term goal, furthering our access to other innovative hubs and ecosystems. Through funding, mentorships, new contacts with investors, and our social media and public exposure enhancement, we would benefit from a priceless opportunity to scaling up our impact and catalyze our activities.

Winning the Prize will increase our network and fellowship. We will have access to support from fundamental actors in the social entrepreneurship area, such as MIT Solve, allowing us to deepen our program's development, in line with the current challenges the world is facing, offering upskilling and reskilling to the end-users and using High-end technology. It will ensure that our solutions are at the highest level of quality and innovation, and accessibility increasing our impact. With the funding, we will strengthen our multidisciplinary team, as well as developing new content and technological resources for our e-learning platform that will enable the growth of our online learning and engagement community, and the improvement of the training employability program. 

At the age of 12, I had two passions in life: computers and volunteer work in Rio's slums, with homeless kids.  By age of 23, I was already a tech entrepreneur. That was when I realized my purpose in life: to use technology to transform realities for low-income communities excluded from the digital revolution.

    In the '90s, the Committee for Democratization of Information Technology- CDI was founded, the first Latin America NGO focused on digital inclusion.  CDI created the methodology that put together a solid personal empowering, IT training, and the ethical and fair use of new technologies. CDI became Recode in Brazil and others 8 countries.

   In the rise of the 4th Industrial Revolution, we were pioneers in exploring the ethic and humanized use of exponential technology and kept on developing and adapting activities to put humanity in the center of technological updates, by making people able to read and transform their realities, delivering systemic change and social impact.    Since I became the leader of the first Catalyst 2030 initiative in Brazil, cooperating with other actors and exploring new forms of engagement for systemic change, I realized that Recode should be co-leading solutions to accelerate progress and social inclusion.

By the United Nations, three billion people in the world have no access to the internet due to education, income levels, and digital literacy.

Brazil is the 89th most unequal out of 93 countries in a 3-year average of the Gini Index. World Bank points out that 25 million young people are in economic disengagement in Brazil, neither studying nor working. A study by Google and Mckinsey highlights that the country's GDP could increase up to 70 billion dollars if the right investment was made for building capacity in technology.

The World Economic Forum’s Report (2020) revealed that 84% of employers are accelerating their digitalization agenda and 50% of employers intend to accelerate the automation of jobs. The same year, Brazil reach more than 12 million unemployed people, and the situation is expected to worsen with the growing use of technology, with more than 50% of the jobs likely to be replaced by existing technologies.  Companies are having trouble finding talent in tech, with more than 160,000 vacancies unfilled, more than 420,000 new openings expected by 2024 in Brazil. Democratizing access to qualified training in technology is our strategy to promote the productive inclusion of people in the labor market

What makes us innovative is our facility to adapt to the scenario. During the pandemic, the world realized even more, how important technology is to connect people and boost economic growth. Many businesses have broken down and many people have lost their jobs due to the lack of knowledge about the use of digital tools. During the pandemic, we virtualized our processes, creating a virtual learning platform easily accessible via cell phone. Which also enables offline training. (pandemia eviencial altos índices de exclusão digital. We succeeded by creating new platforms so that anyone could be trained, because many people, in social vulnerability, do not have computers in their homes, but they hardly have any cell phones. Thus, during the lockdown period, when access to schools and community centers was prohibited, many Brazilians were able to improve themselves through these new mobile platforms.  And in the case of the recode pro program, it was 100% virtualized, still allowing the training of young people to continue and doubling the vacancies offered from 100 to 200 young people reached and more than 10800 enrolled students who took courses.  

Here in Brazil, most young people are not allowed to dream about the future. The vast majority of these young people live below the poverty line, in social vulnerability. Public education in our country has been losing quality in a political scenario of corruption and uncertainty. The lives of these young people are limited to the surroundings where they live, within communities where their references are based on drug traffickers and families disrupted by domestic violence. My mission is to break this bubble in which these young people are inserted and show them a range of options that the use of technology can offer them. Through RECODE platforms, these young people were able to allow themselves to dream of a future other than those imposed by society. Our mentoring team has become a reference for these young people. We broke the status quo by allowing this part of society to be able to develop its potential.